Debate Builds Over Drug Companies' Fees to FDA

Mar. 23 -- FRIDAY, April 13 (HealthDay News) -- Controversy continues to engulf renewal of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA), with the key issue being whether the law does enough to protect U.S. consumers from potentially harmful drugs.

The act was passed by Congress in 1992 to establish "user fees" that are paid by drug companies to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to review and vote on new drug applications. In 2008, these user fees are expected to total $438 million and account for more than 42 percent of all the money the FDA receives for regulating drugs.

Now, several sides of the debate are expressed in a trio of opinions that will be published in the April 26 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine; the articles were released Friday to coincide with public debate on the issue.

Opinions about PDUFA, which has to be renewed every five years and is set to expire Sept. 30, vary. They range from those who think the user fees make the FDA too cozy with the drug companies, leading to compromised drug safety, to those who believe the funds are essential to the FDA. Still others think that more of these funds should be spent on drug safety than is currently planned by the FDA.

One of the NEJM articles, co-authored by Sean Hennessy, an assistant professor of pharmacology and epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, argues that more of the PDUFA money should go to FDA-funded drug safety studies once medications have been approved, to monitor their safety in the marketplace.

"FDA has dramatically insufficient resources to perform or commission post-approval safety studies," Hennessy said. "As a result of this, the American people rely almost exclusively on pharmaceutical companies to fund the research to identify the risks associated with their own products."

Hennessy noted that the current plan is to spend only $29.3 million of the almost $438 million in PDUFA fees for drug safety. "This is in stark contrast with the $12 billion spent on marketing prescription drugs each year," he said. "FDA should be provided with the resources so that they have to rely less on industry to study the risks associated with prescription drugs."