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Friday, December 04, 2009

Stealth Comparative Effectiveness in U.S.

Are you sitting down?

The FDA is practicing stealth comparative effectiveness.

Or at least that's one of the claims to come out of a lively panel discussion that attempted to grade the regulatory agenda of the new leadership at FDA during the first day of The Pink Sheet's annual FDA/CMS Summit.

The discussion was sparked some provocative data released by the Director of the Office of New Drugs, John Jenkins, during his status report on new drug approvals. (You think he only took industry to task for submitting incomplete applications? Guess again.)

In an effort to silence critics who charge the FDA is becoming more conservative, approving fewer drugs because of its safety first initiatives, Jenkins and his team parsed applications data for the past 17 years, looking at the percentage of new molecular entities approved on first action during five-year increments. Here's what they found: NMEs with priority review did pretty well; in the most recent period, 68% of the compounds won approval, up from 58% in the previous time period. But for standard NME applications, the story was far different: 70% of the medicines were not approved on first action.

Calling this failure rate "a huge burden on the system," Jenkins challenged the drug industry to do some more navel gazing. "The industry needs to ask itself why the failure rate [for standard NMEs] is so high," he says.

It's not like execs haven't been asking that question. Perhaps the only issue causing more hand-wringing than comparative effectiveness is the lack of R&D productivity in the industry. That's why folks at Lilly, for instance, are aiming to expand their highly publicized Chorus experiment, which aims to identify earlier--and more cheaply--whether new compounds even have a shot at becoming viable medicines.

Mary Pendergast, the former deputy FDA commisioner and now President of Pendergast Consulting looked at Jenkins' data and came up with one possible answer that takes some heat off the industry. Maybe one reason it's so much harder to get the second, third, fourth, and fifth drugs in a class approved these days stems from FDA's desire to see superiority data. "What we are seeing--and should be paying attention to--is [the emergence of] stealth comparative effectiveness," she claims.

Note that current laws stipulate explicitly that FDA does not have a mandate to practice comparative effectiveness. But in Pendergast's view, the emphasis on superiority data "is a tiny loophole that the FDA is driving a truck through."
Align Center
Better that than a camel through the eye of a needle, eh?

Image courtesy of flickrer (cup)cake_eater used with permision through a creative commons license.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am curious to see how they do an efficacy comparison with generic drugs since there are no head to head studies with their branded counterparts. Good luck with that one!

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Anonymous said...

I think these comparative trials undermine the idea of a free market. Doctors are the first to say that there is no one drug that's right for everyone. What if a doctor wants more more sedation, less sedation, less dry-mouth at the expense of slightly lessor efficacy because of a patient's sensitivity to dry-mouth, etc. etc. etc. These are reasons to have multiple variables in a class. The term "me too" gives everyone the thought that every product in a class is identical, although they aren't. This is more of other people forming the foundations of an argument to support taking choice away from people in this country because government thinks "they know what's really best for us".