From an interview with Janet Woodcock that will appear in the September 5 cover story of Business Week …
Q: What’s your vision of how drugs can be used in better, more targeted ways?
A: The overall vision is a medical vision: that we can get better outcomes for people and get a higher percentage of people who actually respond to any given treatment. Instead of your doctor telling you that 40% of the population responds to a drug, he can tell you that if you take this drug, you have a 90% chance of responding.
On the flip side, our vision is that there aren’t bad drugs or good drugs. Instead, some drugs run into bad problems with a small subset of people. Instead of taking all those drugs off the market or putting warnings all over them, we need to make sure that people who are at high risk for a side effect don’t get the drug in the first place.
The vision is that this will actually decrease the cost of health care. We know there is a tremendous burden from adverse events of drugs, and everyone agrees we can do a much better job.
Thanks Janet. Hopefully words presage deeds.
