Peter Pitts Discusses Expedited Reviews and the Current State of Drug Development

Peter Pitts:
Regardless of what you want to call it, whether it’s expedited review or special protocols, limited use medicines, the theory is, “How can the FDA help bring important therapies to the market faster?” And, there are a lot of pieces to that puzzle.

At the end of the day, the agency still has to meet with the sponsor, who still has to have data. They have to meet and decide how to move forward.

There are two issues that also have to come into this conversation:

1. The patient voice
2. Benefit / risk profile

Those are two things that really are not usually discussed. Generally speaking, in this type of conversation what comes about in the discussion is time. How quickly can something happen? Obviously faster is better than slower, but you don’t want to ever sacrifice proper review.