Free Republic

US drugs regulators have approved a heart failure drug specifically for treating black patients. The Food and Drug Administration gave BiDil the go-ahead after tests found it cut by 43% deaths in heart patients who identified themselves as black. The FDA says the drug is a step towards the promise of tailored medicine. But critics say there are no biological differences between ethnic groups and the move is more about making money than helping patients. Trial halted early BiDil was not designed with the specific aim of treating to treat black people, but early clinical trials involving a multi-racial group...

Controversial study suggests treatment should factor in the patient's ethnic group. A heart drug being tested in black patients is on course to become the first medicine approved for use in a specific ethnic group, challenging those scientists who believe that race is a bad basis for prescriptions. The drug, made by Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical company NitroMed, was abandoned after a trial in the 1980s produced unimpressive results. But, because the data hinted at differences between white and black patients' responses, in 2001 NitroMed decided to carry out a further clinical trial using only African Americans. This week NitroMed announced that...

MARKET PLACE A drug aimed at treating heart failure specifically in black patients has proved so effective that the clinical trial in which it was being tested has been halted early, the company sponsoring the trial said yesterday. The results are expected to lead to approval of the first drug specifically for a single ethnic group. They seem to validate the gamble by the company, NitroMed, to take a drug that had failed to win approval for general use and test it only on African-Americans, an approach that ignited controversy on the relevance of race to medicine. The company's stock...