Toward a 21st-Century FDA?

In a WSJ op-ed, Andrew von Eschenbach, FDA commissioner from 2005 to 2009, is surprisingly candid about how the FDA is killing people.

When I was commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from 2005 to 2009, I saw firsthand how regenerative medicine offered a cure for kidney and heart failure and other chronic conditions like diabetes. Researchers used stem cells to grow cells and tissues to replace failing organs, eliminating the need for expensive supportive treatments like dialysis and organ transplants.

But the beneficiaries were laboratory animals. Breakthroughs for humans were and still are a long way off. They have been stalled by regulatory uncertainty, because the FDA doesn’t have the scientific tools and resources to review complex innovations more expeditiously and pioneer regulatory pathways for state-of-the-art therapies that defy current agency conventions.

Ultimately, however, von Eschenbach blames not the FDA but Congress:

Congress has starved the agency of critical funding, limiting its scientists’ ability to keep up with peers in private industry and academia. The result is an agency in which science-based regulation often lags far behind scientific discovery.

Should we not, however, read the following ala Strauss?

The FDA isn’t obstructing progress because its employees are mean-spirited or foolish.

…For example, in August 2010, the FDA filed suit against a company called Regenerative Sciences. Three years earlier, the company had begun marketing a process it called Regenexx to repair damaged joints by injecting them with a patient’s own stem cells. The FDA alleged that the cells the firm used had been manipulated to the point that they should be regulated as drugs. A resulting court injunction halting use of the technique has cast a pall over the future of regenerative medicine.

A peculiar example of a patient-spirited and wise decision, no? And what are we to make of this?

FDA scientists I have encountered do care deeply about patients and want to say “yes” to safe and effective new therapies. Regulatory approval is the only bridge between miracles in the laboratory and lifesaving treatments. Yet until FDA reviewers can be scientifically confident of the benefits and risks of a new technology, their duty is to stop it—and stop it they will. (emphasis added).

von Eschenbach ends with what sounds like a threat or perhaps, as they say, it is a promise. Unless Congress funds the FDA at higher levels and lets it regulate itself:

…we had better get used to the agency saying no by calling “time out” or, worse, “game over” for American companies developing new, vital technologies like regenerative medicine.

Frankly, I do not want to “get used” to the FDA saying game over for American companies but nor do I trust Congress to solve this problem. Thus, von Eschenbach convinces me that if we do want new, vital technologies like regenerative medicine we need more fundamental reform.