From the pages of the Washington Examiner ...
Potential FDA chiefs eye faster drug approvals
Donald Trump's potential choices to lead the Food and Drug Administration have called for the agency to ramp up approval of new products, though in drastically different ways.
Two people have been floated as being under consideration to lead the agency: agency veteran and physician Scott Gottlieb and libertarian and investment firm director Jim O'Neill.
Both candidates reflect a desire by President-elect Trump to speed up approval of new products, albeit through different approaches. Trump didn't talk a lot about the FDA during the campaign, but he has said that the agency needs to cut red tape to get new products approved.
O'Neill is the managing director at the investment firm Mithril Capital, which was co-founded by Trump donor and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. O'Neill also served as the deputy administrator in the Department of Health and Human Services during President George W. Bush's administration.
He previously has called on the FDA to approve drugs based solely on safety and not on effectiveness, a radical departure from the current approach.
The agency currently approves drugs based on whether they are safe and effective. However, it threads a fine line at times, balancing the risk of a drug versus the expected benefit, especially if it is a new or experimental treatment.
The agency this year approved an experimental therapy called Sarepta for the rare and deadly disorder Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, but came under fire from consumer advocacy groups who say the agency should have rejected it because of serious safety concerns.
Gottlieb has called for a different regulatory approach at the agency, but hasn't gone to the same extremes as O'Neill.
In July, he advocated for clinical trials for drugs that treat rare diseases. He pointed to the 21st Century Cures Act, which Obama signed into law on Tuesday and would enable the agency to approve drugs using a different clinical endpoint called a surrogate measure.
"These are interim endpoints that can be used to more quickly gauge a medicine's benefit, such as measuring its ability to shrink a patient's liver rather than having to wait for kids to accrue enough disability to see if a drug can help them walk or breathe better," he wrote in the Chicago Tribune.
He also said the law nudges the FDA to make wider use of "adaptive" trials that test a drug on a smaller group of patients.
An agency veteran who worked with Gottlieb said that having support from the agency's career staff is vitally important to getting goals accomplished.
"It is important for the commissioner to be a change agent, not a bomb thrower," said Peter Pitts, a former associate commissioner at the FDA and the president and CEO of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest. "If you bring in someone who is aggressively contrary to agency culture, those [career staff] will simply wait him out."
However, if a commissioner can get buy-in from career staff who actually review products, it can "help him accomplish it," Pitts said.
Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, has problems with both potential picks.
"I don't know if there is any reason to guess that the president has a real vision for the FDA besides the broad brush deregulate," said group President Robert Weissman. "I think that both of these potential candidates are in line with that. Both of them on the pharma side particularly aim to lower the standard of review for new drugs, presumably for existing drugs as well."
It is not clear who Trump will pick for the FDA. However, several other Cabinet picks have shown that Trump is willing to tap people who aim to radically shake up the agencies they are set to lead.
For instance, Trump tapped former Texas Gov. Rick Perry to lead the Energy Department, an agency he pledged to eliminate while running for president in 2012.
He also chose Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt sued the agency on multiple occasions over several regulations and said that people "are tired of seeing billions of dollars drained from our economy due to unnecessary EPA regulations."
Whomever Trump chooses, Pitts said that he is heartened that names are at least being floated early in the transition.
"A lot of times it is left as an afterthought," he said.
Potential FDA chiefs eye faster drug approvals
Donald Trump's potential choices to lead the Food and Drug Administration have called for the agency to ramp up approval of new products, though in drastically different ways.
Two people have been floated as being under consideration to lead the agency: agency veteran and physician Scott Gottlieb and libertarian and investment firm director Jim O'Neill.
Both candidates reflect a desire by President-elect Trump to speed up approval of new products, albeit through different approaches. Trump didn't talk a lot about the FDA during the campaign, but he has said that the agency needs to cut red tape to get new products approved.
O'Neill is the managing director at the investment firm Mithril Capital, which was co-founded by Trump donor and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. O'Neill also served as the deputy administrator in the Department of Health and Human Services during President George W. Bush's administration.
He previously has called on the FDA to approve drugs based solely on safety and not on effectiveness, a radical departure from the current approach.
The agency currently approves drugs based on whether they are safe and effective. However, it threads a fine line at times, balancing the risk of a drug versus the expected benefit, especially if it is a new or experimental treatment.
The agency this year approved an experimental therapy called Sarepta for the rare and deadly disorder Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, but came under fire from consumer advocacy groups who say the agency should have rejected it because of serious safety concerns.
Gottlieb has called for a different regulatory approach at the agency, but hasn't gone to the same extremes as O'Neill.
In July, he advocated for clinical trials for drugs that treat rare diseases. He pointed to the 21st Century Cures Act, which Obama signed into law on Tuesday and would enable the agency to approve drugs using a different clinical endpoint called a surrogate measure.
"These are interim endpoints that can be used to more quickly gauge a medicine's benefit, such as measuring its ability to shrink a patient's liver rather than having to wait for kids to accrue enough disability to see if a drug can help them walk or breathe better," he wrote in the Chicago Tribune.
He also said the law nudges the FDA to make wider use of "adaptive" trials that test a drug on a smaller group of patients.
An agency veteran who worked with Gottlieb said that having support from the agency's career staff is vitally important to getting goals accomplished.
"It is important for the commissioner to be a change agent, not a bomb thrower," said Peter Pitts, a former associate commissioner at the FDA and the president and CEO of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest. "If you bring in someone who is aggressively contrary to agency culture, those [career staff] will simply wait him out."
However, if a commissioner can get buy-in from career staff who actually review products, it can "help him accomplish it," Pitts said.
Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, has problems with both potential picks.
"I don't know if there is any reason to guess that the president has a real vision for the FDA besides the broad brush deregulate," said group President Robert Weissman. "I think that both of these potential candidates are in line with that. Both of them on the pharma side particularly aim to lower the standard of review for new drugs, presumably for existing drugs as well."
It is not clear who Trump will pick for the FDA. However, several other Cabinet picks have shown that Trump is willing to tap people who aim to radically shake up the agencies they are set to lead.
For instance, Trump tapped former Texas Gov. Rick Perry to lead the Energy Department, an agency he pledged to eliminate while running for president in 2012.
He also chose Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt sued the agency on multiple occasions over several regulations and said that people "are tired of seeing billions of dollars drained from our economy due to unnecessary EPA regulations."
Whomever Trump chooses, Pitts said that he is heartened that names are at least being floated early in the transition.
"A lot of times it is left as an afterthought," he said.
