Gottlieb Targets Drug Development Costs, Clinical Development Efficiencies

Posted 11 September 2017 By Zachary Brennan

FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb on Monday explained to attendees of RAPS’ Regulatory Convergence conference some steps FDA is taking to make the clinical end of drug development more efficient and effective.
Opening with a discussion of the ways in which the gap of time between the discovery of the science behind new treatments and the adoption of such treatments has been shrinking, Gottlieb outlined a few of the ways in which the agency is modernizing its approach to collecting and evaluating clinical information.
And on a day when the discussion of how much it costs to develop a new oncology drug is being hotly debated with the release of a new study, Gottlieb also discussed how the costs of drug development “are also high, and growing.
“There’s been criticism of the various estimates of how much it costs to develop a new drug,” he said, according to the transcript of his speech. “Moreover, on a relative basis, in many cases the costs of early stage drug development has grown at a proportionally faster rate than the cost of late stage drug development. In other words, inflation in early stage drug trials is rising faster than inflation in late stage development.
“By front-loading the cost of drug discovery, the broader biomedical community is making it harder to advance new ideas. It’s economically harder to capitalize the cost of an early stage drug program, relative to funding a later stage project. So frontloading the costs are a recipe for reducing the amount of new ideas that can be advanced.”

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