Category: Clinical Research

Ethics for CRISPR and the Big Leap Forward

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By Kelsey Berry

This week, a research group in China published a paper describing a significant step forward in one application of the genome editing technique CRISPR: they used it to modify the genome of non-viable human embryos. Now, the scientific community finds itself grasping for ethical and legal foundations in order to evaluate the implications of this work and its possible extensions. Bioethicists and philosophers have been laying these foundations for years. Yet, the key problem, as always, is in translation: as we shift from science fiction to scientific reality, the robust and rigorous literature on the ethics of human population enhancement must find its way to usefully inform the policy debate and scientific practice. Translation between these camps can be thorny, but it must start with convergence on the issues at stake. Here’s a quick primer on the issue:

The spark: A team out of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou led by Junjiu Huang used the CRISPR technique in non-viable human embryos to modify the gene responsible for a potentially fatal blood disorder. Leading journals Science and Nature denied the group publication on ethical grounds; the paper can be found in Protein & Cell. This is the first time that the CRISPR technique has been used to modify the human germline; however, the team specifically selected non-viable embryos in which to conduct the experiment in order to side step some of the most pressing ethical concerns.

The technology: CRISPR, which stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” refers to DNA loci that contain repeated base sequences, separated by other sequences called spacers. These spacers are like memories from previous exposure to a virus, and they tell the biological system which invaders to look out for and destroy – a key part of an adaptive immune system. In 2012, a team led by Doudna and Charpentier showed that CRISPRs could also be used to zero in on DNA sequences of their choosing simply by introducing synthetic guide RNA that matched the DNA sequence they wished to target. The CRISPR system would then slice up the targeted DNA sequence, either knocking out a gene entirely or allowing researchers to insert a “patch,” which if incorporated into the DNA sequence would modify the target gene. Since 2012 this technique has been shown to work in several organisms, including in human cells.

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Hopkins faces $1B lawsuit over role in government study that gave subjects STDs

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The Petrie-Flom Center’s Executive Director Holly Fernandez Lynch and Faculty Director I. Glenn Cohen weigh in on the issue in the

Nearly 800 former research subjects and their families filed a billion-dollar lawsuit Wednesday against the Johns Hopkins University, blaming the institution for its role in 1940s government experiments in Guatemala that infected hundreds with syphilis, gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases. […]

Legal experts said the lawsuit’s arguments could be a stretch. Today, professors who frequently serve on a volunteer basis with the National Institutes of Health, for example, are generally considered to be acting independently and not in their capacity as university faculty, said Holly Fernandez Lynch, executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard University Law School.

[…] Because the experiments occurred so long ago, most if not all of the subjects are dead, and it could be difficult for someone to prove that a relative was part of the study, Lynch said. She and colleague I. Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School, argued in a 2012 New York Times opinion piece that the Tuskegee experiment and others provide precedent for a fair recourse.

In the Tuskegee case, a legal settlement included lifetime medical benefits for study subjects and their wives, widows and children, as well as federal grants to promote research and health care ethics, they said. U.S. aid applied directly to Guatemalan health could be appropriate in this case, Lynch said.

“Congress and the [Obama] administration must step up more than they have, by offering financial restitution to Guatemalans with plausible claims of harm,” Lynch and Cohen wrote. “Even if the lawsuits were appropriately dismissed, justice has not been done.”

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The “Right to Try” – Compassionate Use of Experimental Medicine, 5th Annual Cathy Shine Lecture

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SHINE_headerThe “Right to Try” –  Compassionate Use of Experimental Medicine

5th Annual Cathy Shine Lecture

Thursday, March 19, Noon – 1 p.m.
Boston University Medical Campus Instructional Building
Bakst Auditorium
72 East Concord Street, Boston, MA
Free and open to the public
Reception will follow

Is it fair to use social media or personal connections to get experimental drugs? Is it possible to reconcile so-called “right to try” laws—which allow patients access to novel, unapproved treatments—with evidence-based medicine and a drug-approval process charged with ensuring safe and effective medicines? Professor Caplan examines whether the duty to rescue should play a role in regulatory policies, physician advocacy, and corporate behavior in the US. Read More

The Puzzle Of Antibiotic Innovation

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This new post by Kevin Outterson appears on the Health Affairs Blog, as part of part of a series stemming from the Third Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Friday, January 30, 2015.

Dame Sally Davies, the Chief Medical Officer of England, warns that we are approaching an antibiotic apocalypse. A former chief economist at Goldman Sachs estimates that unless dramatic action is taken now, antimicrobial resistance could kill 50 million people a year and cause $100 trillion in cumulative economic damages.

In the US, dire warnings have issued from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and the President himself through an Executive Order on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria in September 2014 (summary here). The President’s new budget asks for $1.2 billion to be spent on antibiotic resistance. […]

Read the full post here.

The People of the State of New York v. Actavis: Making a Hard-Switch Procompetitive

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By Ryan Abbott

Actavis is back in the spotlight regarding its allegedly anticompetitive behavior. Last month, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York issued an injunction against Actavis and its subsidiary, Forest Laboratories LLC based on the New York Attorney General’s “product hopping” suit.

The suit concerns Actavis’ attempt to extend monopoly protection for its drug Namenda. Namenda is one of only a few FDA approved drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease, and the only approved drug in a class of medications that act on the glutamatergic system by blocking NMDA receptors. Namenda is also Actavis’ largest revenue generating drug; it brought in $1.5 billion in sales last year. Unfortunately for Actavis, Namenda’s patent protection is due to expire in 2015. Once the patent protection for Namenda has expired, Actavis should ordinarily expect to see a dramatic reduction in sales revenue, as much as 90% in the first year, as consumers switch to a lower-cost generic version.

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The Right to Try Meets the Reality of Drug Approval

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By Joan H. Krause

[Cross-posted at HealthLawProf Blog]

Whether it be a social media campaign to convince a company to provide an experimental anti-viral drug to a young cancer patient suffering from a life-threatening infection or the debate over appropriate treatment for high-profile Ebola cases, access to potentially life-saving but unapproved medications remains a controversial issue. Two recent articles, published on the same day, illustrate the difficulty of trying to balance desperate patients’ willingness to try unproven therapies with the very real concerns faced by manufacturers undergoing the drug approval process. The first was a Kaiser Health News article describing the passage of “Right to Try” laws in five states. The second was a brief note in the Los Angeles Business Journal that shares of CytRx Corporation, a biopharmaceutical R&D company, had fallen 9% after the company announced that the FDA had placed a partial clinical hold on its clinical trials after a patient’s death.

Right to Try laws are designed to give patients who have exhausted all other treatment options the right to access investigational medications, devices, and biological products that have met Phase I safety milestones. Right to Try legislation has been enacted in Colorado, Louisiana, Michigan and Missouri, and voters recently approved it by initiative in Arizona. The laws are based on model legislation drafted by the Goldwater Institute, which issued a detailed report on the issue in February 2014. While prohibiting states from blocking patient access to such medications, however, the model legislation does not require manufacturers to provide the products, nor does it require insurance companies to cover the costs. Read More

Arthur Caplan on Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

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Art Caplan has a new piece on hyperbaric oxygen therapy over at NBC News:

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Have you ever heard of it? The Internet sure has.

Centers and clinics tout the benefits of sitting in a tank breathing 100 percent oxygen at higher than atmospheric pressure for treating autism, infant brain trauma, multiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue, cerebral palsy and many other conditions.

There’s just one problem: There is no solid evidence that hyperbaric oxygen therapy does anything for any of these disorders.

Read the full article here.

Clinical Trials Regulation in India

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

An op-ed from our friends Mark Barnes and Barbara Bierer at Harvard’s Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center on recent legal changes to India’s clinical trial requirements, arguing that using the clinical trial context to promote a social or political policy agenda in India may sacrifice scientific integrity in the service of social justice.  A quick snippet:

The overbreadth of these requirements, and how poorly tailored they are to achieve the specific goal of protecting clinical trial participants from risks directly caused by trials themselves, leaves one wondering whether the regulatory authorities fully comprehend the clinical trial process and the nuances of complex medical and biological processes. One further wonders whether what animates these measures may be less a concern for specific justice in individual cases than the goal of righting social wrongs and achieving social justice, unrelated to but prompted by clinical trial experiences. Achieving social justice and a more just allocation of social resources may be completely laudable – even desirable – as social or political policy, but unconsciously using the clinical trial context to promote this agenda threatens to corrupt science and to undermine health, with results that may create more social distress than social justice.

Read the full piece here.

And more commentary from MRCT on this issue:

The Ethics of Using Placebo Controls in Ebola Clinical Trials

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[Blogger’s Note: I am very pleased to share this post by my colleague at Seton Hall Law, Carl Coleman. This post was cross-posted at Health Reform Watch.]

By Carl H. Coleman

With well over 5,000 global deaths from Ebola already reported, drug developers are working fast to begin human clinical trials of promising experimental treatments.  Earlier this month, US government officials announced plans to launch a study of multiple Ebola interventions at the NIH Clinical Center, Emory University, and the University of Nebraska.  Shortly thereafter, the international relief organization Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) announced that it would soon begin testing of three experimental interventions at its treatment centers in West Africa, in collaboration with a coalition of European partners and the World Health Organization.

As predicted in an earlier blog post, a major area of contention in these trials involves the ethical acceptability of using placebo controls.  Plans for the US study are to give some participants the experimental drugs and others placebos, with everyone receiving the best supportive care available, such as fluid replacement and medications to fight off other infections.  In the MSF trials, by contrast, none of the participants will be given placebos; instead, everyone will receive one of three different experimental interventions.

From a methodological perspective, it is easy to see why the designers of the US study have chosen to use placebos.  Placebo-controlled trials are widely considered the “gold standard” of clinical research.  Using placebos makes it possible to identify the extent to which observed outcomes in participants are the result of the experimental intervention, as opposed to factors such as access to better health care facilities, receipt of supportive care, or psychological expectations (the so-called “placebo effect”).  Read More

European Responses to the Ebola Crisis: Initiatives at the European Medicines Agency (EMA)

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By Timo Minssen

The current Ebola outbreak already attracted much attention on “Bill of Health” resulting in some excellent blogs on a horrible topic.

While it is evident that the current health crisis requires both immediate responses and more sustainable changes in health care policy, research and regulation, medicines regulators are collaborating internationally to find innovative solutions enhancing evaluation of and access to potential new medicines to fight Ebola outbreaks. In a statement announced by the International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities (ICMRA) in September 2014, regulators around the world led by the FDA and the EMA have vowed to collaborate in supporting accelerated evaluation of experimental new drugs to treat Ebola virus infections and say they will encourage submission of regulatory dossiers. This clearly backs up the World Health Organization’s (WHO) decision to test experimental Ebola treatments in infected patients in the current outbreak region in West Africa and to speed up the development of vaccines.

In the following I would like to summarize and discuss some of the recent European responses to the current crisis starting with an overview on recent initiatives at the EMA.

Like its US counterpart, the EMA leads a close and consistent dialogue with public and private developers of Ebola products and spends much effort in reviewing available information on the various experimental Ebola treatments currently under development. These experimental drugs range from experimental antivirals or vaccines based on the adenovirus or stomatitis vaccine to experimental therapies based on mono- and polyclonal antibody technologies. One of these unapproved antibody combination drugs – MAPP Biologicals’  ZMapp – has already been used in some care workers affected by Ebola. Other experimental drugs that are currently reviewed by the EMA include Biocryst’s BCX 4430, Fab’entech’s Hyperimmune horse sera, Sarepta’s AVI-7537, Toyama Chemicals and MediVector’s Favipiravir and Tekmira’s TKM-Ebola.

Other companies such as Bavarian Nordic  and the Russian Mikrogen are close to follow.

In addition to monitoring experimental drugs and enhancing global collaboration, the European Medicines Agency has like the FDA initiated several activities in order to support and speed up the development of these drugs towards market approval.  Read More