A recent news article in NATURE describes a novel thrust in
cancer drug development. An organization called Friends of Cancer Research has
convinced the US National Cancer Institute and the US Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) to support a new model for late stage clinical trials.
Based on the previous success of the pioneering
I-SPY-2 and BATTLE trials, the idea is to streamline the drug-approval process by
bringing pharmaceutical companies together to test multiple experimental drugs
under a combined ‘master protocol’. While this concept makes a huge amount of
sense, it had previously been resisted by pharmaceutical companies who were concerned
about loss of intellectual property. Now, however, frustrations with and escalating
costs of drug development are bringing companies to consider new models such as
this one.
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