Megan and John Crowley (Courtesy of the Crowley Family)
Last night President Trump was attacked for speaking about Megan Crowley a 20-year-old freshman at Notre Dame who was diagnosed at birth with an orphan illness called Pompe Disease.
The reason? The President used the opportunity to call for more medicines to keep young women like Megan alive.
Here’s what the President said:
"Megan was diagnosed with Pompe Disease, a rare and serious illness when she was 15 months old. She was not expected to live past 5.
On receiving this news, Megan's dad, John, fought with everything he had to save the life of his precious child. He founded a company to look for a cure, and helped develop the drug that saved Megan's life. Today she is 20 years old -- and a sophomore at Notre Dame.
Megan's story is about the unbounded power of a father's love for a daughter.
But our slow and burdensome approval process at the Food and Drug Administration keeps too many advances, like the one that saved Megan's life, from reaching those in need.
If we slash the restraints, not just at the FDA but across our Government, then we will be blessed with far more miracles like Megan."
He had not even finished his speech when cynics on Twitter and in the media, belittled the Crowley family’s courage because, in their view, they were tools for what they hysterically call Trump’s reckless gutting of the FDA. (Note that they never specify what would be gutted but assure us that if Trump got his way, the FDA would turn America into The Walking Dead.
Of all the sniping and snide observations, Former FDA commissioner David Kessler and Washington Post reporter Carolyn John stand out as the most obnoxious and condescending.
For his part, David Kessler posted on Twitter @DavidAKesslerMD
Trump mischaracterizes Pompe drug approval process. Approved in 9 months based on 39 patients. Not "slow and burdensome."
First, Trump never even mentioned the Pompe drug (Myozyme, the drug Crowley’s company developed) approval.
Second, “approval” refers to the FDA’s review of all the other studies and data the agency requested. The FDA is required by law to review such completed applications in 180 days. Not. Nine. Months.
Meanwhile, it took about 6 years to complete the studies used to establish the drug’s safety and efficacy. That’s a lot less than the 10 years it takes to evaluate drugs for larger groups of patients.
But third, and most important, Crowley was in the audience because if the FDA was using its current regulatory approach to orphan drugs in 2001, the drug still wouldn’t be approved. Nor is Crowley is calling for gutting the FDA as critics hysterically claim. As Crowley points out in an op-ed in the New York Observer: “the FDA must always put patient safety first.”
The problem is that despite having a decade of experience in dealing with rare pediatric conditions like Pompe or Fabry, the FDA now often requires more information than ever before to approve orphan drugs. As a result, they take as much time and money to get through the FDA as do medicines more common conditions,
But the award for the most sneering and fact-free hit piece goes to the Washington Post’s Carolyn Johnson:
“The actual drug, that saved Megan’s life is manufactured in Belgium and was developed by a biotech company founded by a Dutch immigrant — a company that is today owned by a French firm. The drug was invented through a scientific experiment that couldn’t have happened without international collaboration. And a president who has said he wants to bring down drug prices just held up as a shining example of innovation a drug that costs an average of $298,000 a year, per patient.”
Key omissions:
The company was Genzyme, a US biotech company founded in Boston – not Europe -- to bring orphan drugs to market. Genzyme was sold to Sanofi, which invests most of its R&D in the United States.
Moreover, the cheap shot about drug prices (“a shining example of innovation” Johnson snarks) ignores the fact that the average price of hard to manufacture medicines for very small groups of patients has declined since Genzyme developed Ceredase for Gaucher’s disease in 1990 for a list price of $360000. (That’s $558000 in 2016 dollars.)
The sneering continues:
"It’s also unclear whether the Crowley’s inspiring story and the development of the drug Myozyme (also called Lumizyme) is really an example of how “our slow and burdensome approval process at the Food and Drug Administration keeps too many advances, like the one that saved Megan’s life, from reaching those in need,” as Trump described.
Other companies have pointed to Myozyme as an example of the agency’s flexibility in getting drugs approved quickly, based on small amounts of data.
Briefing materials prepared by the drug company Sarepta Therapeutics to support the approval of their drug last year cited Myozyme as an “approval precedent” that they hoped to follow.
Last April, at a hearing in support of Sarepta’s drug, one of the researchers involved in Myozyme’s approval testified to the advisory committee that its passage through the regulatory process as a helpful parallel to consider.
Against the recommendation of its advisory committee, which wanted to see more evidence, regulators approved that drug."
Omission: In fact, FDA reviewers virtually told the FDA advisory committee not to approve the Saretpa drug because it followed the Myozyme approach.
No one is suggesting that Myozyme was delayed by the FDA or that the agency in the last couple of years has been quicker in reviewing applications for drug approval.
The issue is whether the FDA could move more quickly by requiring data that has less to do with establishing the safety and benefit of medicines and more to do with employees demanding an increasingly higher degree of statistical certainty that has nothing to do with those goals
The issue is whether the Amicus drug for Fabry Disease – approved in Germany, Japan, and Great Britain – requires another randomized study and two more years of data to determine whether patients are more likely to have diarrhea.
The issue is whether patients and their families should have as much to say about the drugs that shape whether they live or die as well how they live, as the naysayers who claim that the experts know better.
The smug elite – like Kessler and Johnson -- realize their power over the FDA review process is slipping away and they are beside themselves that Donald Trump is determined to wrest their control away. How can you tell? Because they turned a courageous young woman and her father’s decade-long struggle to save her life into objects of their rage against the new President.
