Mallory Factor, chairman of IntraBio, has worked with regulatory agencies in both the U.S. and Europe on matters relating to clinical development programs. In doing so he had the opportunity to observe the obstacles that serve to delay and even restrict novel orphan therapies from getting to patients. He believes orphan drug developers and the FDA must collaborate more closely to bring more treatments to approval.
Unmet medical need (UMN) is not a new concept, but it is an increasingly important one. Regulators and payers are nudging the industry to steer R&D investments toward areas with higher unmet need and less crowded pipelines.
On May 30, 2018 President Trump signed Senate Bill 204 into law. The law, more commonly known as Right To Try (RTT), allows certain patients access to investigational drugs outside of clinical trials. Now that it is law, what will RTT mean to you?
The FDA published a new draft guidance on August 10, 2018 entitled, Expansion Cohorts: Use in First-In-Human Clinical Trials to Expedite Development of Oncology Drugs and Biologics. The comment period for the draft guidance closed on October 12, 2018 and approximately 20 comments were submitted to the docket. The guidance provides sponsors with recommendations for designing and conducting first-in-human (FIH) multiple expansion cohort trials within their oncology development programs.
For researchers hoping to conduct clinical trials on cannabis-based products, the U.S. is not the most hospitable place. While other countries are legalizing the drug and conducting research on its possible medicinal uses, state and federal regulations on marijuana in the U.S. continue to stymie its use.
In recent years, a growing number of pharmaceutical companies have recognized the potential benefits of pre-launch access programs, either as components of later-stage clinical development or early access programs or to support importation of drugs into countries recognizing an FDA or European Medicines Agency (EMA) approval.
“A bad system will beat a good person every time.”1 This quote by legendary management thinker W. Edwards Deming introduces the fundamental concept underlying process thinking. Process thinking, as the name implies, is a human factors-derived philosophy concerned with viewing the world through a process-oriented perspective. Processes are the essential components of our systems that enable them to execute their purpose: any set of steps designed to achieve an objective can be considered a process. The wide scope of this definition reflects the abundance of processes in all areas of our lives – both inside and outside the workplace. Based on this definition, a process is an objective-driven task.
While controversy continues to simmer over who is accountable for posting results on ClinicalTrials.gov, perhaps the “results debate” masks the more challenging problem: ClinicalTrials.gov is not working for its intended audience.
For patients with sickle cell anemia, just getting through the day can be a struggle. Symptoms of the disease include vision problems, swelling of the hands and feet, and periodic episodes of pain that can last from a few hours to a few weeks. In this article Nick Leschly, CEO at bluebird bio, discusses the progress being made with its investigational gene therapy for sickle cell disease.
When it comes to GCP audits and inspections, low-hanging fruit says a lot about the tree.
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