Remember, the media love salacious headlines - EVIL DRUG COMPANY DOES XXX
The US FDA would come down on Pfizer ike a ton of bricks if they claimed their drug treated an “unrelated” disease. Liability potential would be outrageous also. They certainly would NOT be allowed to market the drug for Alzheimers unless years of studies were conducted.
Not the issue. This is not about them making the claim to market the item.
This is about doing clinical trials.
“Remember, the media love salacious headlines - EVIL DRUG COMPANY DOES XXX
The US FDA would come down on Pfizer ike a ton of bricks if they claimed their drug treated an “unrelated” disease. Liability potential would be outrageous also. They certainly would NOT be allowed to market the drug for Alzheimers unless years of studies were conducted.”
Yes, both observations are very true.
-—Not the issue. This is not about them making the claim to market the item.
This is about doing clinical trials.-—
By the time clinical trials were done the drug would be off patent. The company would be spending huge amounts of money and resources for other company’s to then make all the money.
The thing to keep in mind is that anyone can fund a clinical trial using an approved drug to determine it’s efficacy for another indication.
Further, any doctor could prescribe the drug for Alzheimer, this is called off label use.
The FDA does not tell doctors how to practice medicine. The FDA does oversee that marketing drugs have been shown to do what they are claimed to do, so any company marketing for Alzheimer’s would have to do long and expensive clinical studies.
I think that in addition to being another “capitalism bad” article there is a purpose to the article in that there is probably a push to make a new law regarding patent rights that would make it easier for a company to gain exclusivity for a new indication.
In other words, here change it so that Pfizer would have protection for Alzheimer use — if Pfizer was able to show it were effective against Alzheimer’s they would retain exclusive rights for that. Then it would be worth them spending the money.
It’s not a bad idea to modify the law for this, but there can always be pluses and minuses in changes such as this.