Bumps on the Road Towards Clinical Trials Data Transparency- A recent U-Turn by the EMA?

By Timo Minssen

In a recent blog I discussed the benefits and potential draw-backs of a new “EU Regulation on clinical trials on medicinal products for human use,” which had been adopted by the European Parliament and Council in April 2014. Parallel to these legislative developments, the drug industry has responded with its own initiatives providing for varying degrees of transparency. But also medical authorities have been very active in developing their transparency policies.

In the US, the FDA proposed new rules which would require disclosure of masked and de-identified patient-level data. In the EU, the EMA organized during 2013 a series of meetings with its five advisory committees to devise a draft policy for proactive publication of and access to clinical-trial data. In June 2013 this process resulted in the publication, of a draft policy document titled “Publication and access to clinical-trial data” (EMA/240810/2013).

Following an invitation for public comments on this document, the EMA received more than 1,000 submissions from stakeholders. Based on these comments the EMA recently proposed “Terms of Use” (TOU) and “Redaction Principles” for clinical trial data disclosure.

In a letter to the EMA’s executive director Dr. Guido Rasi, dated 13 May 2014, the European Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, has now expressed concern about what seems to be a substantial shift of policy regarding clinical trial data transparency. Read More

DUE 6/3: Call for Abstracts: Emerging Issues and New Frontiers for FDA Regulation

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The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and the Food and Drug Law Institute are pleased to announce an upcoming collaborative academic symposium:

Emerging Issues and New Frontiers for FDA Regulation

Monday, October 20, 2014 

Washington, DC

We are currently seeking abstracts for academic presentations/papers on the following topics:  Read More

SAVE THE DATE: 9/18/14, Post-Trial Access to Medicines: Responsibilities and Implementation

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Please join us for a day-long conference at Harvard Law School on September 18, 2014, which will include presentations by leading experts and varied stakeholders as well as small group discussion and break out sessions that will work toward developing consensus in this difficult area.

Key questions include:

  • How should post-trial access be defined?
  • What type of interventions should be included in post-trial access obligations?
  • What are the responsibilities of various stakeholders?

More information, including the developing agenda, will be posted on the Petrie-Flom Center’s website as it becomes available.

Cosponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and the Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center at Harvard University.

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Art Caplan on ‘Right to Try’ Law: More Cruel Than Compassionate

Art Caplan has a new opinion piece up at NBC News on Colorado’s new “right to try” law, which “expands access to experimental medications, making it legal for the terminally ill to seek access to drugs that have not yet received FDA approval.” From the article:

Colorado has become the first state to enact a so-called “right to try” law that expands access to experimental medications, making it legal for the terminally ill to seek access to drugs that have not yet received FDA approval. Many others are considering doing the same thing.

Politicians know a surefire winning issue when they see one. Sounds like a great idea? The truth is, such laws are utterly inadequate for helping the dying and the desperate. They would better be described as “right to beg” laws — a right which, sadly, the terminally ill already have and already use in social media campaigns.

Read the full article.

TUESDAY, 5/20 conference: “Biostatistics & FDA Regulation: The Convergence of Science & Law”

Biostatistics and FDA Regulation: The Convergence of Science and Law

Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 8:00am – 5:00pm

Wasserstein Hall, Milstein West AB, Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave.

Symposium Presented by the Drug Information Association (DIA), the Food and Drug Law Institute (FDLI), and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, in collaboration with the Harvard School of Public Health Department of Biostatistics and Harvard Catalyst | The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center.

Biostatistics is the application of statistics — the study of the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation and presentation of data — to a wide range of topics in life sciences.  Biostatistics informs the Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory decision-making processes for premarket review of investigational drugs and devices and post-market surveillance of medical products, including decisions to require safety labeling changes and withdraw approval.   Recent developments, such as Congress’s creation of a new federal infrastructure for the dissemination of comparative effectiveness information, point to the need for a fresh look at the way in which biostatistical principles inform federal health care policy, particularly at the FDA.  This one-day symposium will give attendees the foundational knowledge they need to understand how biostatistics applies in FDA regulation, and will also address closely related issues residing at the intersection of statistical analysis and life sciences litigation. The full conference agenda is available on the website.

Registration is required in order to attend this event. Please register here.

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“Sanitizing” Lethal Injection

By Nadia N. Sawicki

Oklahoma’s botched execution of Clayton Lockett has brought increased attention to an issue that I have been concerned with for years – the increased “medicalization” of legally sanctioned executions, and, in particular, the role that medical professionals and the scientific community play in this process.

Until the 20th century, most executions were conducted publicly – execution was a communal ritual that served as a means of catharsis. But the American execution process has, over time, become less visible, and, as a consequence, subject to less public oversight. I believe that the movement of the capital punishment process “behind the curtain,” both literally and figuratively, should trouble death penalty opponents and supporters alike.

The standard lethal injection protocol used throughout the United States was developed in 1976 by Dr. Jay Chapman, Oklahoma’s state medical examiner, and Dr. Stanley Deutsch, chair of the Oklahoma Medical School anesthesiology department. Without testing or research, they settled on a three-drug protocol for executing prisoners – sodium thiopental, a short-acting barbiturate; pancuronium bromide, a paralytic; and potassium chloride, which stops the heart. Until recently, this was the combination used in every state.

Things began to change when Hospira, the U.S. pharmaceutical company that manufactured sodium thiopental, stopped making the drug in 2011. Since then, European manufacturers of sodium thiopental and pentobarbital have limited the production of these drugs, and the European Commission has restricted their export to the U.S. for execution purposes. And just last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in Cook v. FDA that the FDA lacks authority to permit importation of these drugs, which, when used for lethal injection, are considered “misbranded” under the FDCA. As a result, many states, including Oklahoma, have had to resort to other alternatives.

Read More

Call for Abstracts: Emerging Issues and New Frontiers for FDA Regulation

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The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and the Food and Drug Law Institute are pleased to announce an upcoming collaborative academic symposium:

Emerging Issues and New Frontiers for FDA Regulation

Monday, October 20, 2014 

Washington, DC

We are currently seeking abstracts for academic presentations/papers on the following topics:

  • Stem cell therapies
  • Nanotechnologies
  • Genetic (and biomarker) tests
  • Gene therapies
  • Personalized medicine
  • Comparative efficacy research
  • Drug resistant pathogens
  • Globalized markets
  • Tobacco
  • GMO
  • Bioterrorism countermeasures
  • Mobile health technologies
  • Health IT
  • Drug shortages
  • Other related topics

Abstracts should be no longer than 1 page, and should be emailed to Davina Rosen Marano at dsr@fdli.org by Tuesday, June 3, 2014. Questions should also be directed to Davina Rosen Marano.

We will notify selected participants by the end of June.  Selected participants will present at the symposium, and will be expected to submit a completed article by December 15, 2014 (after the event) to be considered for publication in a 2015 issue of FDLI’s Food and Drug Law Journal (FDLJ).  Publication decisions will be made based on usual FDLJ standards.

5/20 conference: “Biostatistics & FDA Regulation: The Convergence of Science & Law”

Biostatistics and FDA Regulation: The Convergence of Science and Law

Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 8:00am – 5:00pm

Wasserstein Hall, Milstein West AB, Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave.

Symposium Presented by the Drug Information Association (DIA), the Food and Drug Law Institute (FDLI), and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, in collaboration with the Harvard School of Public Health Department of Biostatistics and Harvard Catalyst | The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center.

Biostatistics is the application of statistics — the study of the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation and presentation of data — to a wide range of topics in life sciences.  Biostatistics informs the Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory decision-making processes for premarket review of investigational drugs and devices and post-market surveillance of medical products, including decisions to require safety labeling changes and withdraw approval.   Recent developments, such as Congress’s creation of a new federal infrastructure for the dissemination of comparative effectiveness information, point to the need for a fresh look at the way in which biostatistical principles inform federal health care policy, particularly at the FDA.  This one-day symposium will give attendees the foundational knowledge they need to understand how biostatistics applies in FDA regulation, and will also address closely related issues residing at the intersection of statistical analysis and life sciences litigation. The full conference agenda is available on the website.

Registration is required in order to attend this event. Please register here.

Read More

#BELHP2014 Panel 3, Behavioral Economics and Health Care Costs

By Nicholson Price

[Ed. Note: On Friday, May 2 and Saturday, May 3, 2014, the Petrie-Flom Center hosted its 2014 annual conference: “Behavioral Economics, Law, and Health Policy.”  This is an installment in our series of live blog posts from the event; video will be available later in the summer on our website.]

Our third panel, moderated by PFC Academic Fellow Matthew Lawrence, addresses the use of behavioral economics techniques to control health care costs.  Speakers are Christopher T. Robertson, Brigitte Madrian, Ameet SarpatwariAnupam Jena, and Jim Hawkins.  (Many projects are co-authored, but I’m only listing the presenters here)

The first speaker is Professor Christopher T. Robertson, coming from Arizona Law but visiting Harvard and the PFC this year, speaking on Cost-Sharing as Choice Architecture.  He starts by talking about the cost side of cost sharing, which we know works in reducing consumption from empirical evidence; from the RAND study, it reduced use without reducing health.  More recent studies also confirm this.  But cost sharing presents four problems:

  1. Underinsurance relative to ability to pay
  2. Indiscriminate reductions in health care (more of an ax than a scalpel)
  3. An unfair tax on sickness (more tentative if we can solve the first two)
  4. The burden of deciding.

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Summer Course for Professionals in “Pharma Law & Policy” at the University of Copenhagen

Stay abreast with recent developments and trends determining the legal and regulatory framework of the European pharmaceutical industry.

What are the most significant current issues shaking and shaping the pharmaceutical industry today? The business environment and legal framework relevant to the pharmaceutical industry continues to change rapidly in the face of constant challenges posed by competition, politics and technological innovation. Considering the highly lucrative and competitive nature of the industry, it is more important than ever for professionals working with legal and regulatory aspects of drug development to stay abreast of the most recent developments.

This course provides a broad and practical understanding of the ‘hot topics’ and will present and analyse these topics from scientific, legal and policy perspectives.

Further information about the course is available here.

Course content

The course begins with a general overview of the current scientific and legal trends in pharmaceutical R&D, organisation and policy. This is followed by a review of the hot topics through a combination of lectures, discussions, group work and case studies. The course is designed to allow room for the issues and challenges crucial to the participants’ daily work and practice.

Participants

The course is designed for professionals working with legal issues and/or regulatory aspects of drug development, decision-makers, administrators and health care practitioners within both the public and private sectors, e.g.:

  • Legal departments in the pharmaceutical industry.
  • Law firms dealing with patent and competition law in the pharmaceutical industry.
  • Branch organizations in the pharmaceutical sector.
  • Health care professionals and decision makers.
  • Bank and finance consultants working with risk and investment in the pharmaceutical industry.

Credit – especially for lawyers and trainee solicitors

This course meets the Danish requirements for compulsory supplementary training for lawyers and trainee solicitors.

Course dates

5 days, 18 – 22 August 2014, 9:00 – 17:00 at the University of Copenhagen, Frederiksberg Campus.

Course director

Timo Minssen, Associate Professor, Dr., LL.M., M.I.C.L., Centre for Information and Innovation Law, Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen

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