Tag: Accelerated Approval

A male pharmacist is examining a drug from a pharmacy inventory.

Monthly Round-Up of What to Read on Pharma Law and Policy

Ameet Sarpatwari Leave a comment

By Ameet Sarpatwari, Beatrice Brown, Alexander Egilman, and Aaron S. Kesselheim

Each month, members of the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) review the peer-reviewed medical literature to identify interesting empirical studies, policy analyses, and editorials on health law and policy issues.

Below are the citations for papers identified from the month of June. The selections feature topics ranging from an analysis of the characteristics of clinical studies supporting supplemental indications approved between 2017 and 2019, to an evaluation of the effect of California’s prescription drug coupon ban on generic drug use, to a comparison of how various international regulatory bodies approach postmarket safety communication. A full posting of abstracts/summaries of these articles may be found on our website.

Read More

Washington, USA- January13, 2020: FDA Sign outside their headquarters in Washington. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA or USFDA) is a federal agency of the USA.

FDA Approves Aducanumab for Alzheimer’s Disease: An Unethical Decision?

Beatrice Brown Leave a comment

By Beatrice Brown

On June 7, 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the accelerated approval of aducanumab (Aduhelm), a biologic manufactured by Biogen for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

The FDA’s decision, which went against the near-unanimous opinion of its own advisory committee following its meeting in November 2020, has been embroiled in controversy over whether the available evidence demonstrated benefits that outweigh the risks of the drug. Namely, questions remain whether: 1) the conflicting evidence from the two pivotal trials is sufficient to suggest clinical benefit worthy of approval; and 2) the surrogate measure used to justify its accelerated approval is actually correlated with clinical benefit.

Read More

Hundred dollar bills rolled up in a pill bottle

Aducanumab: A Bitter Pill to Swallow

Emily Largent Leave a comment

By Emily Largent

On June 7, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) used the Accelerated Approval pathway to approve aducanumab, which will go by the brand name Aduhelm, to treat patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Aducanumab, developed by Biogen, is the first novel therapy approved for AD since 2003. This news has left many experts stunned.

I have at least one colleague, Dr. Jason Karlawish, who has publicly stated that he will not prescribe aducanumab. Other clinicians have said they will only prescribe it reluctantly. These are individuals who have dedicated decades of their lives to treating patients with AD, to conducting path-breaking research and serving as investigators in clinical trials, and to advocating for public policies that will better serve AD patients and their families. Many have also seen their own families affected by AD. My colleagues are hardly indifferent to the suffering wrought by AD and would like to have a meaningful treatment to offer to patients and their families. But, they have concluded, aducanumab is not it.

Read More

Pile of colorful pills in blister packs

Expanding The Right to Try Unproven Treatments: A Dangerous, Deregulatory Proposal

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Richard Klein, Kenneth I. Moch, and Arthur L. Caplan

A new proposal out of the Goldwater Institute (GI), a libertarian think tank, advances an oversimplified critique of the U.S. regulatory process for approving medicines for COVID-19 and other diseases, with the ultimate goal of weakening the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

You may remember the Goldwater Institute as the architect of the initial state “Right to Try” (RtT) legislation from a few years ago. The idea, marketed as increasing access to experimental medicines, was actually calculated to circumvent FDA oversight so that individuals could try still-unproven experimental medicines without what Goldwater viewed as pointless bureaucratic paternalism. RtT legislation was adopted by 41 states and ultimately by the U.S. Congress.

When former President Trump signed the Right to Try bill into federal law with great fanfare on May 20, 2018, he stated that “countless American lives will ultimately be saved.” Three years later, the promise proved to be meaningless, as evidenced by the difficulty in identifying more than a handful of individuals who have even pursued the RtT pathway, much less finding data to show that it has saved lives.

Read More