Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17633

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Electronic Source

Goozner M
A Solution for Misplaced Incentives
GoozNews 2010 Apr 15
http://newsodrome.com/psychology_news/a-solution-for-misplaced-incentives-16524927

Full text:

The medical community has been in an uproar since the Food and Drug Administration awarded three years of market exclusivity for the centuries-old gout medication colchicine to a small Philadelphia drugmaker. The exclusivity award, based on a clinical trial that finally proved the drug actually worked (it had been grandfathered in under the original FDA safety and efficacy laws and was previously offered by a number of generic manufacturers), raised the price from about $10 a month to $150 a month. (For the full story, see this Wall Street Journal report.)

A commentary in today’s New England Journal of Medicine comes up with the easy solution to the FDA’s desire to fill in the gaps in regulatory data for drugs like colchicine. “An alternative solution, probably much less expensive, would be for the FDA or the National Institutes of Health to fund trials that address outstanding questions related to widely available drugs such as colchicine,” write Aaron Kesselheim and Daniel Solomon of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.