Drugs Approved Under Deadline More Likely to Run Into Trouble Later

Mar. 27 -- WEDNESDAY, March 26 (HealthDay News) -- New research shows that drugs that are approved quickly to meet mandated deadlines are more likely to run into trouble down the line, after they are in millions of Americans' medicine cabinets, than drugs that receive more deliberation before approval.

"It's not necessarily the case that these drugs should not have been approved, but it may have helped to have a black box warning in the first place rather than adding one three years later," said study author Daniel Carpenter, a professor of government at Harvard University. "It's not just the fact of approval. It's approval or regulatory processes assisting clinicians and patients with optimal use down the road. That's a big part of the approval process. It's not just saying yes and no, but saying with conditions and information that help us use drugs well."

The Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA), enacted in 1992, mandated that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration must act on 90 percent of all drug applications within 12 months of submission of the application or face funding cuts. That deadline was narrowed to 10 months in 1997.

"This study actually puts quantitative information around the question of whether the PDUFA user fee laws have resulted in a rush to approve things or to make decisions too quickly and many people, myself included, have worried about this," said Dr. Steven Nissen, chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.

Many critics have also pointed out that the tighter deadlines were not accompanied by necessary increases in funding. "Every group that has looked at the FDA says it is underfunded," said Nissen, who has advocated for repealing PDUFA. "The right answer was to provide more resources so the FDA could evaluate applications more accurately but to do so in a way that doesn't put the FDA in the bind of making decisions too quickly and without adequate consideration of the implications."

Carpenter and his colleagues used a mathematical model to look at the association between PDUFA deadlines, the timing of FDA drug approval and the likelihood of post-marketing safety problems in drugs approved since 1950. The study is published in the March 27 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.