Results for “fda”

324 found

S&P Global: Four Republican lawmakers have authored new legislation to permit drugs for critically ill patients to enter the market before completing late-stage trials, saying the bill was necessary because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory process was too slow and burdensome.

The bill would create a time-limited conditional approval pathway in the U.S. similar to a system that has long been used by European regulators.

…The conditional approval would be valid for one year and could be renewed annually for up to five years….Companies would be required to meet certain obligations, like completing clinical investigations to provide full demonstration of safety and effectiveness and other studies.

…Companies could seek full U.S. approval at any time. The FDA would be required to let manufacturers include in their applications the real-world evidence they collected during the conditional approval period.

The lawmakers want the FDA to be able to grant the limited marketing authorization to new drugs that have successfully completed phase 1 and 2 trials, with the idea that companies could generate revenue to help fund their phase 3 studies.

They emphasized their legislation is targeted especially at small biopharmaceutical companies that may struggle to cover the costs of late-stage trials.

Under the dual-track approval system, companies would be able to sell pharmaceuticals earlier but would be required to track outcomes so greater real world information would be developed in the FDA process. The result is a more dynamic approval process better suited to modern medicine. The idea is due to the excellent Bartley J. Madden (note my bias).

Madden and Nobel-prize winner Vernon Smith explained the dual-track idea, noting:

Today’s world of accelerating medical advancements is ushering in an age of personalized medicine in which patients’ unique genetic makeup and biomarkers will increasingly lead to customized therapies in which samples are inherently small. This calls for a fast-learning, adaptable FTCM environment for generating new data. In sharp contrast, the status quo FDA environment provides a yes/no approval decision based on statistical tests for an average patient, i.e., a one-size-fits-all drug approval process.

A similar process has been adopted in Japan for regenerative medicine.

Once a drug has been approved for some use it can be legally prescribed for any use. New uses for old drugs are often discovered. When physicians learn of these new uses, prescribing practices move beyond the uses that the FDA has evaluated and permitted. In Outdated Prescription Drug Labeling, Shea et al. compare off-label uses for cancer drugs that are graded as “well-accepted” by the National Comprehensive Cancer Drugs & Biologics Compendium (NCCN) with the labelled, “FDA-approved” uses. What they find is that most drugs have multiple off-label uses that are significantly different from FDA approved uses.

Our analysis of the NCCN Compendium and FDA drug labels for 43 cancer drugs approved between 1999 and 2011 identified hundreds of off-label uses, most of which were strongly supported by NCCN expert panels.

We found that 4 of the 5 largest private payers, as well as Medicare, cover over 90% of uses listed on the NCCN Compendium (uses graded 1 and 2A), suggesting widespread acceptance of these uses by diverse stakeholders. While standards for FDA approval differ from standards for coverage determinations, these findings indicate that the gulf between labeled uses and covered uses may be needlessly wide.

To bring FDA labeling up to real-world practice the authors recommend “a collaboration between the FDA and the developers of clinical guidelines and drug compendia to evaluate existing evidence about approved drugs and suggest updates to labeling.” In other words, the decentralized, private approval system should be used to determine which new uses of old drugs are safe and effective and those determinations should then be adopted by the FDA. I agree. But if private practices can be used to approve new uses for old drugs, why shouldn’t similar procedures be used to approve new uses for new drugs?

Three articles on medical breakthroughs, or not, caught my eye. The Wall Street Journal discusses a breakthrough in cancer therapy using HIV to target cancer cells. The news is mostly good but the lead researcher worries that it was only luck which prevented the FDA from ending the research prematurely:

Cytokine-release syndrome almost ended the therapy in its infancy. In 2012, Dr. June’s first pediatric patient, 6-year-old Emma Whitehead, developed a 106-degree fever and experienced multiple organ failure. “We thought she was going to die,” he recalls.

A blood analysis showed high levels of the cytokine interleukin-6, or IL-6. “I happened to know because of my daughter’s arthritis that there was a drug that could target IL-6—that had never been used in oncology,” Dr. June recalls. Fortunately, the children’s hospital where Emma was being treated had the medication, Tocilizumab, on hand. “We wouldn’t have had it at the adult hospital because it wasn’t approved at that point for adult conditions.”

Within hours of receiving the drug, Emma awoke from her coma. “It was literally one of those Lazarus conditions,” Dr. June says. Eight days after receiving the CAR T-Cell injection, she went into remission. Two weeks later, she was cancer-free. She’s now 12 and thriving.

Tocilizumab “saved the field” as well as the girl, Dr. June says. “If the first patient dies on a protocol and nobody’s been cured, you’re over.” Regulators, he adds, always “err on the side of caution.” That irks him, since most of his patients would die without the experimental treatments: “Our FDA regulations are made so that you can never have more than about 30% of people get sick with serious side effects. I think we don’t have enough leeway for side effects when you have a potentially curative therapy.”

In my TED talk I argued that the richer China and India are the better it will be for US cancer patients because the bigger the market the greater the incentive to research and develop new drugs. US patients may also get a second benefit. China is big enough to move world R&D which previously was true only for the US and to a lesser extent (because of price controls) the EU. Since the US has by far the largest pharmaceutical market the FDA is a regulatory hegemon. With China we may get to see for the first time a serious alternative to the FDA. And according to some observers, China’s approval process is less-risk averse.

Some of those [new trials] are in the U.S., but more are taking place in China. “There’s a lot more people there, so you can do a lot more trials,” Dr. June says. “But they also put more of their GDP into medical therapy, particularly CAR T-cells.” Beijing’s drug-approval process is easier, too.

I don’t know whether that is true, but it’s a hopeful sign.

In another story, Lawrence Reed has the inspiring story of Bill Halford who has developed a not-yet-approved vaccine for Herpes. Herpes can be incredibly painful and it infects over one million people a year but the route to a vaccine has not been easy:

Impatient with Washington, Halford injected himself, his family and a group of ten herpes patients. None of his family exhibited any ill effects, evidence that the vaccines were safe. All the sufferers enjoyed dramatic pain relief, suggesting effectiveness. The early success of his research led him to co-found, along with film-maker and entrepreneur Agustin Fernandez, a company known as Rational Vaccines, Inc. (RVx)). Its mission is to fight the herpes epidemic worldwide, using the live, attenuated strains that Halford created.

Peter Thiel is a lead investor in Rational Vaccines. Sadly, Bill Halford contracted cancer and died this year at just age 48. I hope his company will carry the ball over the goal line.

Should we all be taking Metformin? Metformin is a diabetes drug but researchers have found that the people taking the drug also get dramatically fewer cancers. Here is Wired:

What they discovered was striking: The metformin-takers tended to be healthier in all sorts of ways. They lived longer and had fewer cardiovascular events, and in at least some studies they were less likely to suffer from dementia and Alzheimer’s. Most surprising of all, they seemed to get cancer far less frequently—as much as 25 to 40 percent less than diabetics taking two other popular medications. When they did get cancer, they tended to outlive diabetics with cancer who were taking other medications.

As Lewis Cantley, the director of the Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine, once put it, “Metformin may have already saved more people from cancer deaths than any drug in history.” Nobel laureate James Watson (of DNA-structure fame), who takes metformin off-label for cancer prevention, once suggested that the drug appeared to be “our only real clue into the business” of fighting the disease.

It’s not just Wired. Here is the title of a recent meta-analysis:

Metformin reduces all-cause mortality and diseases of ageing independent of its effect on diabetes control: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Metformin is already approved so it could quickly be used off-label  but there is a big problem with anti-aging drugs–there is currently no way any anti-aging drug can get approved.

The assembled scientists and academics focused on one obstacle above all: the Food and Drug Administration. The agency does not recognize aging as a medical condition, meaning a drug cannot be approved to treat it. And even if the FDA were to acknowledge that aging is a condition worthy of targeting, there would still be the question of how to demonstrate that aging had, in fact, been slowed—a particularly difficult question considering that there are no universally agreed-on markers.

The FDA should provide a path to approve anti-aging drugs but if not maybe the CFDA will.

In The Failure of Solanezumab –How the FDA Saved Taxpayers Billions, an article in the NEJM, Sacks, Avorn and Kesselheim (SAK) defend the FDA by arguing that its high standards prevented the Alzheimer’s drug, Solanezumab, from being approved and thus saved the taxpayers billions in Medicare payments.

It is, of course, not the job of the FDA to approve or fail to approve a drug based on its effect on taxpayers. The FDA has historically stood independent of this kind of politics and that has been all to the good. But the SAK article is a reminder that under socialized medicine every FDA decision moves money from one patient group to another and between patients and taxpayers thus FDA decisions become a tempting leverage point to control allocation through collective choice.

I do not favor collective, which is to say politicized, choice and find much else objectionable in the SAK article–it attempts, for example, to evaluate a rule by examining a single decision when a system-wide, long-run analysis is called for. Rather than go into detail, however, let’s instead point to a much better article by Vradenburg, Fillit, Morgan, Sabbagh, Aisen, and Mohs, a group of leading physicians and scientists who treat Alzheimer patients and research the disease.

Rather than support or criticize an isolated FDA decision, Vradenburg et al. call for a change to the rule/norm currently used to evaluate Alzheimer’s drugs:

The analysis…recommends that the FDA approve new medicines that demonstrate a proven benefit on at least one therapeutic endpoint – either cognition or function. The current FDA standards require a new drug to show benefits on both proven endpoints, an unnecessarily challenging hurdle the authors say may be inhibiting investment in new Alzheimer’s treatments.

The authors make three excellent points about such a change. First:

…the success rate of drugs tested for Alzheimer’s disease has been extraordinarily low when compared with drugs in other therapeutic areas. Of the 244 compounds that were tested in 413 clinical trials between 2002 and 2012, only one resulted in approval of a new chemical entity, in 2003. No others have been approved since that time; the failure rate in clinical trials conducted over the last decade exceeds 99.6%. This staggeringly high failure rate has adversely impacted investment in Alzheimer’s disease research at precisely the time when new advances are most needed.

The failure rate reflects how difficult the problem is but also policy. Either way, when firms look at the billions of dollars in research and development that haven’t led to a single approved drug they are naturally wary about spending more. Breakthroughs don’t happen randomly, however, they happen after lots of trial and error. To stimulate such trial and error firms need revenues and thus to stimulate more swings at the bat it may be justified to approve drugs with relatively small benefits.

Second, as I have noted previously, the FDA needs to be careful not to commit an error of composition. Three ineffective drugs need not add up to an ineffective treatment.

Many drugs in development for Alzheimer’s disease have complementary mechanisms of action. Even if each of these might, individually, deliver a modest clinical benefit, when used in combination or adjunctively, the benefit could become more substantial. If the FDA were to reject, individually, several safe and well-tolerated therapies with complementary mechanisms of action that each demonstrate a modest clinical benefit, it would unwittingly deprive patients of potentially substantial advances in the quality of treatment over the long run with a combination of therapies.

Third, it is ultimately the patient that matters, especially with regard to Alzheimer’s where so much depends on the patient’s internal experiences, and thus we ought to be careful before rejecting their perspective:

The ultimate perspective on clinical meaningfulness, of course, comes from the patient….Efforts to identify what matters, what matters most and how much change matters to patients should become a priority for the field, focused on all stages of the disease. The requirements of the recently-passed 21st Century Cures Act are instructive in this regard.

Hat tip: Abhay Moghekar

In the words of a recent article, the FDA’s rejection of a recent drug application was a stunning setback. Stunning setbacks are by definition unpredictable and unpredictable risks aren’t correlated with other risks which means that they can be easily priced and bought and sold. The all-star team of Adam Jørring, Andrew W. Lo, Tomas J. Philipson, Manita Singh and Richard T. Thakor propose just this in Sharing R&D Risk in Healthcare via FDA Hedges.

The idea is to create FDA Hedges that pay out a fixed fee if a drug fails to be approved and zero otherwise. Pharmaceutical firms could then buy some of these contracts and reduce their risk exposure which in turn would increase their incentive to invest in R&D.

The idea is clever but firms and even more so firm owners already have many ways to diversify and its not clear what the value of an additional source of diversification is, even one that is more closely tuned to the firm’s profits. It’s also not clear how much additional R&D would be driven by offloading these risks. Pharmaceutical R&D is valuable, however, so even small increases in R&D are welcome even if more fundamental changes would be better. Prices in these markets would also provide useful information.

I also worry that we are asking a lot of FDA reviewers and firm insiders to keep their inside information private. Information about FDA approval decisions is already very valuable and there have been a few cases where insiders trade on their information or leak it to make millions. FDA Hedges might make this problem worse which should be balanced against the possible gains.

Does Donald Trump want to streamline the FDA and speed new drugs to patients? The Washington Post thinks that it can read the tea leaves:

A single sentence in President-elect Donald Trump’s health-care platform sends a strong hint to the drug and medical device industry that they may have an easier time getting their products on the market under his administration.

“Reform the Food and Drug Administration, to put greater focus on the need of patients for new and innovative medical products,” his health plan states.

On the face of it, the bullet point may seem almost bland, but efforts to integrate patients’ preferences and encourage innovation often result in proposals aimed at speeding up the process for getting new medicines on the market by easing regulations. Critics argue that such efforts can erode standards that are in place to protect patients from drugs that don’t work and might even be harmful.

“The language … is industry code for deregulation and reducing of safety standards,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a consumer watchdog.

There is plenty of evidence that the FDA is too slow (see, for example, here, here, here and here) so I would support such a move. Senators Cruz and Lee proposed a reciprocity bill last term under which drugs approved in other developed countries would quickly be approved here; perhaps such a bill could find renewed interest in a Trump administration (Economists also support the idea of reciprocity.)

On the other hand, Trump has expressed support for Medicare being allowed to negotiate drug prices which is tantamount to price controls given the size of Medicare and that is potentially a disaster. Price controls could significantly reduce research and development in the pharmaceutical industry and end up greatly adding to the invisible graveyard. Trump’s advisers would seem to lean towards streamlining the FDA process rather than imposing price controls but it’s difficult to be certain.

The NYTimes has an incredible story on a simple, paint-on liquid that stops tooth decay and prevents further cavities:

Nobody looks forward to having a cavity drilled and filled by a dentist. Now there’s an alternative: an antimicrobial liquid that can be brushed on cavities to stop tooth decay — painlessly.

The liquid is called silver diamine fluoride, or S.D.F. It’s been used for decades in Japan, but it’s been available in the United States, under the brand name Advantage Arrest, for just about a year.

The Food and Drug Administration cleared silver diamine fluoride for use as a tooth desensitizer for adults 21 and older. But studies show it can halt the progression of cavities and prevent them, and dentists are increasingly using it off-label for those purposes.

Ari Armstrong has the right reaction:

So the Japanese have been using this drill-free treatment for “decades,” yet we in the United States have had to wait until last year to get it. And the only reason we can get it now to treat cavities is that it happens to be allowed as on “off-label” use for what the FDA officially approved it for.

The NYTimes continues:

Silver diamine fluoride is already used in hundreds of dental offices. Medicaid patients in Oregon are receiving the treatment, and at least 18 dental schools have started teaching the next generation of pediatric dentists how to use it.

…The main downside is aesthetic: Silver diamine fluoride blackens the brownish decay on a tooth. That may not matter on a back molar or a baby tooth that will fall out, but some patients are likely to be deterred by the prospect of a dark spot on a visible tooth.

…[But] “S.D.F. reduces the incidence of new caries and progression of current caries by about 80 percent,” said Dr. Niederman, who is updating an evidence review of silver diamine fluoride published in 2009.

Fillings, by contrast, do not cure an oral infection.

But as Armstrong writes the craziest part of the story is this:

American dentists first started using similar silver-based treatments in the early 1900s. The FDA is literally over a century behind the times.

It seems that the future of dental treatment has been here all along but a combination of dentists wanting to be surgeons, lost knowledge, and FDA cost and delay prevented it from being distributed. Incredible.