21st Century Cures Act: Making Progress on Shared Goals for Patients

Posted on December 13, 2016 by FDA Voice

By: Robert M. Califf, M.D.

Today, President Obama signed into law the 21st Century Cures Act, which, I am pleased to report, builds on FDA’s ongoing efforts to advance medical product innovation and ensure that patients get access to treatments as quickly as possible, with continued assurance from high quality evidence that they are safe and effective.

Cures will greatly improve FDA’s ability to hire and retain scientific experts. One of our ongoing challenges has been recruiting and retaining the experts we need in specialized areas to allow us to get our work done and meet our growing responsibilities. This is an especially important need given the tremendous advances in biological sciences, engineering, information technology and data science. Preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic strategies will become more complex with much greater potential for benefit and in some cases greater risk if used without adequate evidence to exclude risks that exceed potential benefits.

This new law rightly recognizes that patients should play an essential role in the development of drugs and devices to diagnose and treat their disease, since patients are in a unique position to provide essential insights about what it is like to live with and fight their disease. That’s been our perspective as well, and it’s why FDA has continued to advance the science of patient input through our patient-focused drug development program and our partner with patients program for medical devices. As it is, Cures will enhance these ongoing efforts to better incorporate the patient’s voice into FDA’s decision-making.

Cures will also support our efforts to modernize and improve efficiency in clinical trial design. This has been an important FDA priority for decades, but exciting new approaches are now available, and we need to develop a common understanding of which designs should be used for which clinical issues. In cancer, for example, we’re already weighing the use of common control trials, which share a control arm, involve multiple different drugs for the same indication, and may even involve different companies. One of the benefits of using a common control arm is that the overall number of patients who need to be recruited and enrolled decreases, thereby optimizing clinical trial resources and potentially shortening the time it takes to get a new study off the ground

Even without the benefit of Cures, patients have been well-served by FDA’s program efficiencies, emphasis on early meetings, and use of expedited pathway programs to speed approval and delivery of new drugs and devices to patients. Rather than passively processing product applications, FDA works to advise companies and inventors from the earliest stages of the development process on the kinds of medical products needed, how to do the necessary research, and how to viably and effectively translate from concept to product. This not only means that important new products will be developed as efficiently as possible but also that medicines and devices with no chance of success are identified much earlier so that money isn’t wasted on futile development. These programs have been embraced by developers of medical products in this country, and they are making a real and positive difference.

In the United States, the FDA uses expedited programs (fast track, priority review, accelerated approval, and breakthrough therapy) for drugs and biologics more than comparable drug and biologic regulators in other countries use theirs and as a result FDA is the first to approve a majority of novel drugs compared to our foreign counterparts.

For devices, this past year was the first full year of operation for FDA’s expedited access pathway (EAP) program, which helps speed the development and availability of certain medical devices that demonstrate the potential to address unmet medical needs for life-threatening or irreversibly-debilitating diseases or conditions. So far, we have granted 24 devices access to this program. Cures builds on EAP by creating the breakthrough device pathway.

The law establishes other new programs as well. For instance, the Limited Population pathway will help streamline the development programs for certain antibacterials and antifungals intended to treat targeted groups of patients suffering from serious or life-threatening infections where unmet need exists due to lack of available therapies. Approvals of these antimicrobials are expected to rely on data primarily targeting these limited populations. The statement “Limited Population” will appear prominently next to the drug’s name in labeling, which will provide notice to healthcare providers that the drug is indicated for use in a limited and specific population of patients. The limited population statement, additional labeling statements describing the data, and FDA review of promotional materials, will help assure these drugs are used narrowly to treat these serious and life-threatening infections while additional evidence is generated to assess safety and effectiveness for broader use.

Cures also creates a new program for the development of regenerative medicine products, an important and exciting new field that deserves this special focus. The program designates drugs as regenerative advanced therapies and takes appropriate actions to improve the efficiency of development and to enhance the exchange of information among FDA, researchers and developers. An especially important element of this program is the creation of a research network and a public-private partnership to assist developers in generating definitive evidence about whether their proposed therapies indeed provide clinical benefits that are hoped for.

Looking ahead, much still needs to be done to spur product development. There have yet to be successful therapies identified for certain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, where underlying scientific knowledge is still lacking. In addition, we are only at the early stage in building a national evidence generation system based on registries, claims data, and electronic health records that will be a rich source of post-market data and an avenue for conducting more efficient research. Last week we published a consensus of FDA leadership on the use of real world evidence in the New England Journal of Medicine, focusing on the misperception that randomized trials and real world data are incompatible. In fact, the use of randomization within the context of clinical practice will constitute a major advance in evidence generation and we are actively encouraging proposals with this combination of randomized trials conducted in real world practice. Cures provides support for continued exploration of the use of real world evidence in the regulatory context.

The law also addresses drug firms providing healthcare economic information to payers and formulary committees. This complex area will require careful delineation of principles to guide information exchange to enable these entities to appropriately assess the value of drugs.

With Cures, great progress has been made towards our shared goal of advancing regulatory science so that we can continue to speed the discovery, development, and delivery of medical products to prevent and cure disease and improve health while sustaining the evidence framework that enables assurance to the public of the safety and effectiveness of medical products. We are excited about the major advances in NIH funding, and welcome the increasing focus on rigorous translational science and data sharing reflected in the bill. Furthermore the funding of opioid addiction treatment and mental health services is a major positive element for our country and consistent with tremendous needs that we recognize.

FDA now stands ready to work with Congress, our sister federal agencies and the medical products ecosystem to implement these important provisions as we continue to work on behalf of all Americans to protect and promote public health and promote innovation in this exciting time.

Robert M. Califf, M.D., is Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration