Tibor Duris/Dreamstime
In his State of the Union address this week, President Trump urged Congress to pass right-to-try legislation that would allow patients suffering from terminal illnesses to access new drugs and other treatments that have undergone preliminary Food and Drug Administration (FDA) safety trials, but have not yet been shown to be efficacious in clinical trials. It's a good start. But it's no substitute for a top-down overhaul of the agency's entire process for testing and approving new drugs.
Traditionally, patients only get access to new drug treatments once they are approved by FDA after passing through three phases of clinical trials. The goal of phase 1 trials is to test new compounds for patient tolerabilty and safety. Typically 20 to 100 patients participate in Phase 1 trials. Phase 2 trials aim to determine proper dosage levels for new treatments while also checking for further evidence that the new compound is safe and possibly efficacious. Several hundred patients may be enrolled in Phase 2 trials. Phase 3 trials focus on efficacy and monitor for adverse reactions and may involve thousands of participants. In Phase 3 trials, the efficacy of new medications is often benchmarked against current treatments.
One recent report estimates that only 1 in 10 new drugs that enter clinical trials are eventually approved by the FDA. It is noteworthy that only 31 percent of drugs that currently enter Phase 2 studies go on to Phase 3 trials. In other words, more than two-thirds of biopharmaceuticals that pass through Phase 1 safety trials end up being deemed insufficiently efficacious as treatments for the diseases at which they are targeted.
So far, 38 states have passed right-to-try legislation. Since drugs and medical treatments are regulated at the federal level, state laws so far have had little apparent effect on enabling patients gain access to experimental treatments. Consequently, right-to-try proponents want Congress to pass legislation that would allow patients with terminal illnesses to seek access to experimental drugs that have passed through Phase 1 safety trials.
Many drugmakers have been reluctant to offer treatments not yet approved by the FDA on a right-to-try basis for fear being sued by patients or their heirs should bad outcomes occur. In addition, they worry that any adverse events among right-to-try patients would delay eventual FDA approval. Consequently, the proposed federal legislation provides that the makers of experimental drugs could not be held liable by patients for any untoward outcomes and that FDA regulators would be barred from taking into account the results of right-to-try treatments when reviewing such drugs for approval.
Opponents of right-to-try legislation fear that it would enable unscrupulous practitioners to sell the moral equivalent of snake oil to desperate people. In addition, opponents point out that the FDA already has a compassionate use program that allows patients and their physicians expanded access to investigational drugs.
New FDA administrator Scott Gottlieb recently announced changes that aim to speed up the process of providing access to drugs and devices for patients with serious conditions (generally prior to product approval), when there is no therapeutic alternative.
In addition, the agency provided guidance to drugmakers clarifying that suspected adverse reactions from experimental treatments administered on a right-to-try basis must be reported "only if there is evidence to suggest a causal relationship between the drug and the adverse event." The FDA does also note that greenlighting access to experimental treatments does not require drugmakers to provide them to patients.
Right-to-try is at best a band-aid. Comprehensive reform of the clinical trial process is a better and cheaper way to speed new medications to the bedsides of patients. As I have earlier argued:
The FDA should be modernized so that new treatments become available to patients once they have made it through the Phase II safety testing. Patients who choose the new treatments would essentially be enrolled in Phase III efficacy trials. This would drastically cut the time and the expense it takes to get new medicines to people.
I am not alone in urging this reform of the drug approval process. In a February 14, 2012 Wall Street Journal op-ed, former FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach argued that "after proof of concept and safety testing, the [new therapeutic] product could be approved for marketing with every eligible patient entered in a registry so the company and the FDA can establish efficacy through post-market studies." Elsewhere von Eschenbach pointed out this FDA reform would mean that new drugs could…
…come to market after promising early-stage research in targeted patients, with appropriate post-marketing studies required. Payers and patients would be the ultimate judge about the quality of the product, and companies could learn from the experience to develop superior products if needed. Companies would still be liable for unforeseen side effects, but patients and doctors would be warned—through the drug's labeling—that the product had been approved based on promising but provisional research. Gradually replacing or reducing dependence on Phase 3 trials with smaller, faster adaptive trials and post-market surveillance would have a positive impact on medical innovation and the U.S. economy….
Ultimately, the molecular bases of health and illness will be unraveled later in this century, at which point the hit-or-miss process of using clinical trials to evaluate medicines will be superseded by precisely targeted individualized treatments.
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