Time is of the essence to those who require mesothelioma treatment. If that includes you, then your need for mesothelioma treatment that is as effective as possible and as fast as possible puts you at odds with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
FDA is tasked with protecting the public health by assuring the safety, effectiveness and security of all drugs sold in the United States. With responsibilities of this scope, the FDA typically has to move slowly and carefully to try to avoid mistakes that can have adverse effects on many people’s health.
Even though you want better mesothelioma treatment options to be available to you right now, you would not be well-served if there were no regulations and a bogus company could sell you anything whether or not it really worked. That is precisely what used to happen in the U.S. as self-appointed “doctors” travelled around in horse-drawn wagons selling phony bottled medicines that they promised would cure everything. Putting the brakes on these “snake oil salesmen” helped prompt Teddy Roosevelt into signing the Food and Drug Act in 1906 which in turn led to the creation of the FDA a few years later.
Now a potential new way to speed the slow testing of cancer drugs and quickly separate good ones from duds may be closer to FDA approval. The promising new method involves studying drugs in small groups of people and using sophisticated statistical techniques to analyze the results as they come in, instead of waiting for all the data to arrive, according to a recent Associated Press report that was widely published in the media.
Although the new drug testing method is currently being tried on breast cancer drugs, if proved accurate it could be applicable to drugs for many types of cancer.
“Bringing a new drug to market usually takes more than a decade and tests in thousands of patients, and costs more than $1 billion. Companies can’t afford many studies like that, and patients can’t wait years for potentially life-saving medicines,” said Don Berry, a biostatistician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He helped design the novel analytical method which has been in development for several years. It involves the cooperative efforts of the National Cancer Institute, the FDA, many drug companies, dozens of cancer research centers and charitable foundations.
We will keep you informed of any new developments for this new drug approval process for mesothelioma treatment.