Wade Ackerman

Ackerman’s qualifications to co-lead Covington’s digital health initiative and to work as a member of the firm’s Food and Drug Administration regulatory group stem from the experience he gained in his federal government posts. Before he joined Covington in 2016, he was senior FDA counsel to the ranking member of the U.S. Senate committee overseeing health, education, labor and pensions. Earlier he was associate chief counsel to the FDA.

On the Senate committee, he helped negotiate the 21st Century Cures Act, a 2016 law that authorized $6.3 billion in funding, mostly for the National Institutes of Health to streamline the drug and device approval process.

“A large piece of that law was about technology and data and how they’d transform health care,” he said. “When I got to Covington, we put together a digital health initiative to prepare ourselves to give cross-practice strategic advice across the broad array of legal, regulatory, commercial and policy issues relating to the development and marketing of digital health technologies.”

Many current regulations were written for an earlier era, before digital technology transformed the data landscape. “We help our clients get ahead of the curve as the regulatory framework shifts,” Ackerman said.

Making the move from the government to Covington “wasn’t a hard sell,” he added, pointing out that the firm’s base in Washington, D.C. put it at the center of regulatory action. “I’d been in a lot of briefings about the transformative nature of data technology and I wanted to leverage all this expertise.”

In the early days of the pandemic, Ackerman co-led a team of Covington lawyers advising the American Clinical Laboratory Association in advocating with congressional leadership for a $25 billion testing fund, helping ramp up the U.S. COVID-19 response. “This was long before the vaccine, and testing was critical. I felt privileged to be part of helping the trade association get more funding as part of the early solution to the crisis,” he said.

Ackerman serves as lead counsel for Accumulus Synergy, a nonprofit biopharma information exchange platform funded by Amgen Inc., Astellas Pharma Inc., Bristol Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline plc, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly & Co., Pfizer Inc., F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, Sanofi SA and Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. The consortium, formed in 2020, is planning to transform how drug innovators and health authorities interact worldwide.

“One focus is on how drug companies interact with regulators globally,” Ackerman said. “We get advice from Covington colleagues on antitrust issues and cross-industry strategies.”

He added: “It’s one of the ways I enjoy my practice as I put my government work to use.”

--John Roemer