From the pages of Forbes ...
How To Maintain FDA Standards
Don't follow Marcia Angell's recommendations.
Bruce Gingles and Thomas P. Stossel,
For over 100 years, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has balanced bringing important new medical products to patients with ensuring their safety. No drug or device is 100% safe, but physicians have steadily obtained ever more effective tools that increase patient longevity and quality of life.
Still, critics we dub "pharma-scolds" depict the FDA as a stooge of medical-products manufacturers and demand that the agency develop a more adversarial relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. One inveterate fault-finder, whose opinion is often sought by credulous audiences, is Marcia Angell, former acting editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and author of The Truth About the Drug Companies. In an April 6 piece in The Boston Globe, Angell made sweeping recommendations that, if enacted, will set back patient care.
First, Angell wants to eliminate the "user fees" drug companies currently pay the FDA to evaluate their products. Such fees, she argues, confer "employee" status on the agency. But these companies have no input into the FDA's final decision to approve or deny new drug applications. Substantial research shows that user fees benefit patients by allowing the agency to hire additional staff to process new drug applications in a timely manner.
And many other federal agencies--even the post office--supplement their budgets with user fees. Taxpayers clawing their way out of an economic recession should appreciate that the industry pays in part for its own regulation.
Next, Angell wants the FDA to exclude industry consultants from advisory committees on new products. But evidence shows that the most productive scholars have industry relationships, and that such relationships have no effect on their recommendations for drug approval. It seems Angell would rather have the FDA get less useful advice than turn to experts who work with companies to develop life-saving products.
Angell also wants direct-to-consumer advertising for new products banned for three years after they're launched, limiting market penetration so that side effects not detected by pre-approval trials will affect fewer patients. But since rare complications emerge only after widespread product use, her recommendation is illogical. Banning this advertising, as Angell suggests, would mainly serve to keep useful products from patients who need them.
This brings us to Angell's worst idea: discouraging "me-too" products--drugs developed as variants of new medicines--based on the incorrect presumption that such products increase costs without adding clinical value. Once a new drug is approved, Angell suggests, no more drugs should be approved for the same general purpose unless it is judged superior to the first product in head-to-head clinical trials.
But Angell fails to understand that most useful innovation is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Tweaking antibiotics, for example, counteracts the penchant of disease-causing microbes to develop resistance to them. Radically curtailing second-generation products makes neither medical nor economic sense and borders on murderous absurdity.
The introduction of "me-too" products by multiple companies facilitates testing of the products in different clinical indications, expanding their versatility and benefit to patient. Competition among brand products reduces prices, and sales of incrementally beneficial products provide the revenues to support the research and development of the occasional breakthrough drug.
If the first cholesterol-lowering drug (called a statin) for preventing heart attacks had been not Merck's ( MRK - news - people ) Mevacor, but Bayer's ( BAY - news - people ) Baycol--which was later shown to have potentially fatal side effects--and the FDA had delayed the introduction of new statins because it was waiting for evidence from head-to-head trials, patients who needed to cholesterol reduction and had only Baycol available would have been without any alternative. As another example, lanidomide is not materially more effective than thalidomide (from which it is derived) as a treatment for the disease multiple myeloma, but it lacks thalidomide's side effects.
Angell also wants the FDA to exclude surrogate measurements--like cholesterol, which correlates with heart attack risk--as criteria for approval of second-generation products, because such measurements don't always predict clinical outcomes. Instead, Angell thinks companies should conduct expensive trials to document clinical benefits.
However, surrogate values are frequently predictive. Scientists use surrogate markers to make reasonable predictions about actual outcomes in patients--giving patients faster access to new treatments. FDA approved both thalidomide and lanidomide based on surrogate measurements. Abandoning them would make a perfect enemy of the good.
Last but not least, Angell wants to accelerate FDA approval of generic products, alleging that the "FDA takes roughly twice as long to approve them as to approve brand-name drugs." Generics are the ultimate "me-too" products--they're just cheaper copies of older drugs.
Generics are fine, but Angell draws a false comparison. User fees do shorten the time between the filing of a new drug application and an FDA decision; pre-application development time for innovative products is far longer than for generics. A better metric is to compare actual numbers of new drug and generic drug approvals: In 2008, the FDA approved 21 innovator drugs and 90 first-time generics.
In short, Angell's calls for reform would lead to decreased patient access to lifesaving new products, higher drug prices and less competition between pharmaceutical companies. As public policy, that's a prescription for bad health.
Bruce Gingles is vice president of Cook Group, a medical device company. Thomas P. Stossel is a professor of medicine at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
How To Maintain FDA Standards
Don't follow Marcia Angell's recommendations.
Bruce Gingles and Thomas P. Stossel,
For over 100 years, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has balanced bringing important new medical products to patients with ensuring their safety. No drug or device is 100% safe, but physicians have steadily obtained ever more effective tools that increase patient longevity and quality of life.
Still, critics we dub "pharma-scolds" depict the FDA as a stooge of medical-products manufacturers and demand that the agency develop a more adversarial relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. One inveterate fault-finder, whose opinion is often sought by credulous audiences, is Marcia Angell, former acting editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and author of The Truth About the Drug Companies. In an April 6 piece in The Boston Globe, Angell made sweeping recommendations that, if enacted, will set back patient care.
First, Angell wants to eliminate the "user fees" drug companies currently pay the FDA to evaluate their products. Such fees, she argues, confer "employee" status on the agency. But these companies have no input into the FDA's final decision to approve or deny new drug applications. Substantial research shows that user fees benefit patients by allowing the agency to hire additional staff to process new drug applications in a timely manner.
And many other federal agencies--even the post office--supplement their budgets with user fees. Taxpayers clawing their way out of an economic recession should appreciate that the industry pays in part for its own regulation.
Next, Angell wants the FDA to exclude industry consultants from advisory committees on new products. But evidence shows that the most productive scholars have industry relationships, and that such relationships have no effect on their recommendations for drug approval. It seems Angell would rather have the FDA get less useful advice than turn to experts who work with companies to develop life-saving products.
Angell also wants direct-to-consumer advertising for new products banned for three years after they're launched, limiting market penetration so that side effects not detected by pre-approval trials will affect fewer patients. But since rare complications emerge only after widespread product use, her recommendation is illogical. Banning this advertising, as Angell suggests, would mainly serve to keep useful products from patients who need them.
This brings us to Angell's worst idea: discouraging "me-too" products--drugs developed as variants of new medicines--based on the incorrect presumption that such products increase costs without adding clinical value. Once a new drug is approved, Angell suggests, no more drugs should be approved for the same general purpose unless it is judged superior to the first product in head-to-head clinical trials.
But Angell fails to understand that most useful innovation is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Tweaking antibiotics, for example, counteracts the penchant of disease-causing microbes to develop resistance to them. Radically curtailing second-generation products makes neither medical nor economic sense and borders on murderous absurdity.
The introduction of "me-too" products by multiple companies facilitates testing of the products in different clinical indications, expanding their versatility and benefit to patient. Competition among brand products reduces prices, and sales of incrementally beneficial products provide the revenues to support the research and development of the occasional breakthrough drug.
If the first cholesterol-lowering drug (called a statin) for preventing heart attacks had been not Merck's ( MRK - news - people ) Mevacor, but Bayer's ( BAY - news - people ) Baycol--which was later shown to have potentially fatal side effects--and the FDA had delayed the introduction of new statins because it was waiting for evidence from head-to-head trials, patients who needed to cholesterol reduction and had only Baycol available would have been without any alternative. As another example, lanidomide is not materially more effective than thalidomide (from which it is derived) as a treatment for the disease multiple myeloma, but it lacks thalidomide's side effects.
Angell also wants the FDA to exclude surrogate measurements--like cholesterol, which correlates with heart attack risk--as criteria for approval of second-generation products, because such measurements don't always predict clinical outcomes. Instead, Angell thinks companies should conduct expensive trials to document clinical benefits.
However, surrogate values are frequently predictive. Scientists use surrogate markers to make reasonable predictions about actual outcomes in patients--giving patients faster access to new treatments. FDA approved both thalidomide and lanidomide based on surrogate measurements. Abandoning them would make a perfect enemy of the good.
Last but not least, Angell wants to accelerate FDA approval of generic products, alleging that the "FDA takes roughly twice as long to approve them as to approve brand-name drugs." Generics are the ultimate "me-too" products--they're just cheaper copies of older drugs.
Generics are fine, but Angell draws a false comparison. User fees do shorten the time between the filing of a new drug application and an FDA decision; pre-application development time for innovative products is far longer than for generics. A better metric is to compare actual numbers of new drug and generic drug approvals: In 2008, the FDA approved 21 innovator drugs and 90 first-time generics.
In short, Angell's calls for reform would lead to decreased patient access to lifesaving new products, higher drug prices and less competition between pharmaceutical companies. As public policy, that's a prescription for bad health.
Bruce Gingles is vice president of Cook Group, a medical device company. Thomas P. Stossel is a professor of medicine at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
