The Curious Technologist
By: Stephen M. Ostroff, M.D.
As the year draws to a close, I want to reflect on FDA’s many accomplishments in these previous 12 months, the last nine of which it has been my pleasure to serve as Acting Commissioner. FDA has broad responsibilities – indeed, we are tasked with overseeing products that account for about 20 cents of the consumer dollar — so we work on a wide range of topics in any given year. In this and two additional blog posts over the coming days I’ll cover some of our key accomplishments in 2015. Each blog will examine a different area of FDA’s work. This first post will focus on medical product innovation – our role in making safe, effective and innovative products available to patients who need them.
Scientific advances and unprecedented innovation in the sectors we regulate make it an exciting time to work at and lead FDA. To protect and promote the public health our regulatory decision-making must be nimble and current, adapted to the forward march of science.
One measure of our success is revealed in a study released in September by FDA’s independent Science Board. Mission Possible: How FDA Can Move at the Speed of Science documents the Agency’s progress and transformation over the last eight years, dating from a time when FDA had been increasingly unable to meet its scientific responsibilities due to chronic underfunding, a loss of scientific expertise, and the need to implement new legislative mandates without the resources to do so. In stark contrast, today FDA’s regulatory science enterprise is much stronger, which better allows us to effectively fulfill our commitment to protect the public health. The report also provides recommendations for future investments in regulatory science to assure FDA keeps pace with emerging trends in science and technology.
Medical Product Approvals
For many years now, we’ve strived to modernize and streamline the regulatory process along the entire development, review, and product oversight continuum.
The success of these changes is shown by the large number and wide variety of medical products we’ve approved across our medical product centers. So far this year, we have approved more than 40 novel drugs, including four new treatments for patients with multiple myeloma, two new drugs for patients with heart failure, and another robust year of approvals of drugs for rare or “orphan” diseases. We’ve approved several important vaccines, including one for serogroup B meningococcal disease, the first seasonal influenza vaccine to contain an adjuvant (intended for people 65 years and older), and a new indication for anthrax vaccine to prevent disease following exposure to anthrax – the first vaccine to receive an approved indication based on the Animal Rule (which provides for testing certain products on animals alone). And we saw the approval of several innovative devices that will make a positive difference in the lives of patients, including a device that extends the survival time of patients with brain cancer, and a transcatheter pulmonary valve that can be placed in certain patients with congenital heart disease, without requiring open heart surgery.
Our success is also measured in our speed and efficiency of approvals. The U.S. continues to lead the world in approving novel drugs first. And we’ve seen important progress in our device review program. Our average time to reach decisions on PMAs has dropped 36 percent since 2009. And not since 2001 FDA has approved as many medical devices under the original premarket approval pathway and the panel track supplement pathway (for significant changes to a PMA device) as we did this year – 58 as of December 14th.
The number of approvals, and the agency’s ability to review products efficiently, continue to be buoyed by FDA’s expedited development and review programs. When we talk to drug and device makers at the early stages of development, and apply better regulatory science to our ultimate review of their applications, products that are likely to fail are weeded out, allowing manufacturers to focus on those more likely to attain approval.
Most importantly, enhanced flexibility and an efficient approval process have come without lowering our gold standard of safety and efficacy. At the end of the day, innovative therapies are only helpful to patients if they work and are demonstrated to be safe. So it is imperative that we ensure the right balances among patient access, sound science, and safe and effective products.
Amplifying the Patient Voice
Enhancing the patient’s voice in the medical product approval and evaluation process is an important emerging area of product development, which we have embraced in a number of ways.
Those living with a disease are in a unique position to provide essential insights about life with their condition, its severity, and the adequacy of treatment options. We also recognize patients and caregivers have their own perspectives on benefits and risks of medical products, and we believe this input should be considered during regulatory decision-making.
Our Patient-Focused Drug Development initiative is a five-year effort that includes holding at least 20 public meetings in different disease areas. Seventeen of those meetings have occurred and seven more are being scheduled. After receiving patient input during each meeting and in the agency docket, FDA develops a Voice of the Patient report that is then posted on our website. In a complementary effort, our medical device program launched the Patient Preference Initiative. It includes studies to evaluate patient preferences in medical devices, and publishing of a draft guidance that describes how patient tolerance for risk and perspective on benefit, in addition to clinical data and other information, may be considered in FDA’s benefit-risk assessments for certain medical devices. This year FDA approved a weight loss device treatment, and our decision was informed in part by data from a patient preference study funded and co-designed by the Agency.
In September 2015, FDA announced our first-ever Patient Engagement Advisory Committee, which will provide advice on complex issues related to the regulation of medical devices and their use by patients. This Advisory Committee will help ensure the needs, experiences, and perspectives of patients are considered in our work and incorporated in our decision-making.
Biosimilars
Five years ago Congress authorized an abbreviated licensure pathway for biological products that are demonstrated to be “biosimilar” to or “interchangeable” with an FDA-licensed biological product. The intent was to create greater competition in the medical marketplace that would not only increase treatment options for patients, but also lead to less expensive alternatives to comparable products. FDA has been developing its biosimilar program since then, an effort which led to the approval of the first biosimilar in March. And there are more applications in the pipeline. To prepare, FDA has produced a variety of guidances in this area, including the recent draft guidance on how these biosimilars should be named.
Advancing the Development of Next Generation Sequencing Tests and Strengthening Clinical Trials
Our strengthened focus on regulatory science is helping to drive innovation. One illuminating example is our growing ability to apply the sophisticated technologies of next generation sequencing and precision medicine.
FDA today is better prepared and more engaged than ever in facilitating the development of these new technologies (as well as new uses for older technologies), while assuring they are safe and effective. These efforts help to achieve more precise diagnosis or treatment, through the development and review of state of the art diagnostics that use genetic information to make therapies more targeted.
We continue to move forward on the White House’s Precision Medicine Initiative to advance biomedical understanding by leveraging genomic advances, health information technologies, and new methods of analyzing large volumes of data. Just this month, we launched FDA’s precisionFDA web platform, a cloud-based portal that will allow scientists from industry, academia, government and other partners to come together to foster innovation and develop the science behind next-generation sequencing and help us design treatments tailored to a person’s individual genetic blueprint.
And we also are working to refine clinical trial design and statistical methods of analysis to create more efficient studies with smaller patient populations, more focused therapies, and better outcomes. For instance, we continue to support collaborative efforts in clinical trials, such as the I-SPY trials (for breast cancer) and the Lung-MAP protocol (for lung cancer).
It’s impossible to capture in one blog post the many ways that FDA’s focus on regulatory science is helping drive innovation and speed the discovery, development, and delivery of medical products to prevent and cure disease and improve health. We are immeasurably proud of these accomplishments, which provide a strong foundation for continuing success.
Stephen M. Ostroff, M.D., is Acting Commissioner of Food and Drugs
The opinions expressed in this blog post are the author’s only and do not necessarily reflect those of MassDevice.com or its employees.
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