A Leaderless European Medicines Agency: Does it Matter?

Will it matter if Europe’s top medicines regulator, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), is without an Executive Director for the next six months or so?

A headless EMA is on the cards because of a translation mistake in a European Commission recruitment advertisement – the use of “Physiker” in German, meaning physicist, rather than the German word for physician.

This meant that the recruitment process, which started earlier this year, had to be repeated, and will not be finalized before Thomas Lonngren, the current Exec Director, bows out at the end of December.

The EMA is really only a co-ordinating center for the 27 national regulatory agencies in the EU, and it’s these agencies, and their employees, that do most of the actual work.

So, it is a totally different beast to a more politicized regulator like the U.S. FDA, where the top position is a political appointee and the agency itself makes the regulatory decisions.

And let’s face it, the FDA has been without a Commissioner in the recent past, and has not gone completely awry, so it should be relatively easy for EMA to do the same. EMA’s recently appointed Acting Executive Director, Andreas Pott should have no problem keeping everything ticking over, anyway; he has been EMA’s head of administration for 10 years.

Maybe there's more required than ticking over, though. Europe has a new Health Commissioner, John Dali, who is keen to make his mark, and there is draft EU legislation rumbling around on counterfeit drugs, patient information, pharmacovigilance and the like. All of this needs EMA's input.

Furthermore, the agency is halfway through deciding its work priorities for the next five years via its “roadmap for 2015”. And what would happen if the region had to confront another public health crisis, like the swine flu epidemic?

On the plus side, when the new (non-physicist?) Executive Director does show up, he or she will (hopefully) be well placed to reinvigorate the agency.

Despite new websites and rebranding initiatives (the infamous pestle-and-mortar logo) and a new, shortened acronym (EMEA is so passé), the agency and its Executive Director are still largely invisible to Europe’s general public.

What EMA really needs is an individual who is comfortable with having a high public profile, someone who is not only a highly skilled regulatory bureaucrat but who communicates effectively to the public, and becomes a publicly recognized figure.

Yes, the agency is excellent at putting “regulatory affairs” documents on its website, but is this what the public wants, or needs? As I write, the communication heading the “What’s New” category on the EMA website is titled: “Guidance on centrally authorised products requiring a notification of a change for update of annexes”. Not something that is likely to grip the attention of many of the EU’s population of half a billion souls.

Perhaps there is an opportunity here to move beyond considering national regulators for the post, and to consider academics, or even individuals with a more political background.

But one major regulatory stakeholder, the pharmaceutical industry, is sure to remain quiet during the recruitment process. Any indication that the industry backs or favours a particular candidate is not likely to enhance that candidate’s prospects. Expect nothing from the industry until the decision is made.

Potential candidates should hurry, however. The closing date for submitting applications is Nov. 24.

-- John Davis

image from flickr user sebr used under a creative commons license