[ad_1]
June 3, 2019 – Every year, thousands of cancer patients seek access to promising but unapproved drugs. Now, they may have a better chance of getting them as part of a new initiative from the US Food and Drug Administration, the Associated Press reported.
This is the case of Sally Atwater, whose doctor spent two months calling and completing forms to obtain an experimental drug to treat her lung cancer that had spread to her brain and to his spine.
And then there is Nancy Goodman, who failed to plead with eight companies for a drug to treat the brain tumor of her child, who eventually killed him.
Rather than asking doctors to beg for these drugs, if the company approves of them, the FDA will intervene and facilitate the process, the agency said at the meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago.
"We are here to help, we are not here to force a pharmaceutical company to give a specific drug to a patient, we do not have that authority," said Dr. Richard Pazdur, who heads the FDA, at the AP.
"We do not want to have the situation where someone who screams the loudest gets the drugs" while others do not, he said.
Goodman, who created the Kids v Cancer group, told AP that the FDA was never the problem, it was the refusal of the drug manufacturers. But the FDA's new program "will absolutely change things," she said.
[ad_2]
Source link