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Efficient Risk Management is one
of five initiatives established for FDA to address five critical
challenges facing the agency.
The risk management initiative encompasses a search for new
and better ways to reduce risks to public health. It pledges
that FDA will continue to effectively manage product risks throughout
their life cycle--from research and development through use/
consumption. Risk management decisions will be supported by
rigorous scientific analysis that weighs, when appropriate,
not only the risk-to-benefit profile of the product itself,
but also the risk versus the benefit associated with Agency
actions.
The following is an excerpt describing this initiative from
FDA's Strategic Plan:
Introduction
New Drug Development
Manufacturing
Imports
Foods
Objectives
Use science-based, efficient
risk management in all agency regulatory activities, so
that the agency's limited resources can provide the most
health promotion and protection at the least cost for
the public. |
The FDA's mission has become much more
complicated. Public health protection now includes addressing
unprecedented challenges and threats to the health of the public--ones
that are more sophisticated and complex than those of the last
century.
The FDA is dealing with new threats in the area of enforcement.
Today, sophisticated criminals are increasingly targeting drugs,
infant formula, and other FDA-regulated products through well-organized
operations. Recently, for example, the FDA has been investigating
what appears to be a major operation selling a counterfeit version
of a cholesterol-lowering drug. High-cost drugs present tempting
targets for counterfeiters like those who put patients at risk
by putting ordinary tap water into vials labeled as Procrit,
a treatment for severe anemia. The "drug" was contaminated
with bacteria. Criminals are increasingly using the anonymity
and reach of the Internet to get illegal drugs to potential
customers. Earlier this summer, an investigation by the FDA's
Office of Criminal Investigations led to the arrest of a man
illegally distributing controlled substances through an Internet
drug site--and this case represents just one of many similar
cases of illegal Web-based pharmaceutical sales that the FDA
has tackled and solved.
In addition, rising health care costs have increased the stakes
for frauds and kickbacks involving drugs and other medical products.
An FDA investigation of sales and kickbacks related to a drug
for prostate cancer helped uncover illegal activity that led
to fines and payments of more than 350 million dollars. The
FDA's regulatory activities involve increasingly complex and
rapidly changing production processes for medicines and foods.
The FDA is also involved in preventing the spread of emerging
infections, such as the recent outbreak of SARS, which are becoming
more common as trade and travel have increased. Finally, threats
of terrorism involving the food supply and other FDA-regulated
products require the agency to consider vulnerabilities to those
who would deliberately harm Americans.
At the same time, industry, government, and foundations are
now spending unprecedented amounts of money to discover and
develop new medical treatments--$100 billion or more this year
alone. And yet the number of new product applications submitted
for FDA review has declined significantly, and in some cases
precipitously. In the pharmaceutical realm, last year the FDA
filed 16 priority new drug applications (NDAs), down from a
high of 32 in 1997 (but up from only 7 in 2001). Standard NDA
submissions are also down, as 87 were filed last year, down
from a high of 101 in 1999. Although the FDA is not responsible
for the number and kinds of products in the development pipeline,
the agency can foster and encourage new product development
by ensuring that its review and approval processes are efficient,
transparent, and predictable. We need to do more than ever to
help make sure that the insights from biomedical science turn
into safe and effective medical products more quickly, and at
lower cost.
The FDA has identified efficient risk management as the primary
way to make the most effective use of agency resources and address
these challenges. Efficient risk management requires using the
best scientific data, developing quality standards, and using
efficient systems and practices that provide clear and consistent
decisions and communications for the American public and regulated
industry. The FDA has long led the way in the science of risk
management, and this ability is more important than ever, given
the expanding complexity of the agency's challenges and the
need to reduce the health risks facing the public at the lowest
possible cost to society.
The principal objective of this strategic action plan is to
do as much as possible to improve the health outcomes of the
American public. Only by becoming consistently more productive
at what the agency does--always working to get the most public
health bang for its regulatory buck--can the FDA have any chance
of fulfilling its increasingly complex public health mission.
Enforcement: Targeting Limited Resources for Maximum Protection
The number of medical products--drugs and devices--that the
FDA regulates now exceeds 150,000--far more than ever before,
including more complex products. There are almost 3,000 investigational
new drugs under development, with their sponsors in the process
of developing the evidence needed for FDA approval. There are
more--and more diverse--dietary supplements on the market than
ever before, and they are now used by most Americans. Americans
also have a much broader range of food choices, including over
6 million food imports this year, with the import numbers growing
rapidly. Access to this growing range of products offers opportunities
for improving health and improving lives, but it also creates
new kinds of vulnerabilities and risks to the public health.
Last year, the agency received some valuable new resources
for carrying out its mission to enforce the laws to protect
the food and drug supply. This included 800 additional personnel,
most of them focused on assuring food safety and food security
at border crossings, ports of entry, and analytical laboratories.
With these resources, the agency has quintupled the number of
food examinations it performs. Even with these additional resources,
however, it is more important than ever for the FDA to use the
best science and the best new enforcement ideas to carry out
its increasingly challenging mission.
The FDA's enforcement strategy consequently focuses on the
most efficient way to get the most compliance with the law.
There are some key principles in the agency's science-based
enforcement strategy:
- Clarity: The FDA must
develop and use clear and consistent guidance and communication
with regulated firms to promote voluntary compliance with
the law. Many businesses are willing to comply with science-based
regulations, but in areas as complex as food and medical product
manufacturing with technologies that are constantly changing,
the FDA has found that assuring a company's understanding
of regulatory requirements can substantially improve compliance.
- Science: The FDA must
remain vigilant to ensure that its practices reflect and allow
for the latest innovations in production, inspection, and
enforcement techniques. The FDA's regulations should be no
more burdensome than necessary, and should encourage valuable
innovation in foods and medical products.
- Leveraging: As the FDA's
mission has become broader and more complex, it is increasingly
beneficial to work with partners, including other federal
and state agencies as well as private oversight organizations,
to bring more resources and a more coordinated, powerful approach
to enforcement.
- Deterrence: In conjunction
with the use of clear, science-based regulatory approaches,
the FDA must also take effective action against those who
deliberately engage in criminal activities or disregard the
FDA's important regulations to promote public safety, including
the use of punishments based on the most effective tools available,
including enforcement actions and criminal prosecutions that
will stand up in court.
New Drug Development: A Need for Greater
Productivity
By some estimates, it costs more than $800 million and typically
takes well over a decade to develop a new drug; and by all estimates,
the cost of developing safe and effective new medical products
has increased greatly, more than doubling over the past decade.
In addition, improvements in biomedical science have not translated
into a better success rate for investigational treatments. The
vast majority of the treatments that enter clinical testing
don't succeed. According to a recent analysis by researchers
at Tufts, of all the new chemical entities that enter clinical
testing, only 21.5 percent will achieve final clinical success
and FDA marketing approval.1
So maybe it's not surprising that, on the one hand, there are
more new medicines under investigation than ever before, but
on the other hand, the number of truly new drugs (new molecular
entities) approved by the FDA has been declining, down to 17
last year from a high of 53 in 1996 (see Figure 1). The decline
in products approved isn't the result of the FDA rejecting more
applications; it is directly related to the decline in the number
of new applications coming in to the agency, and it is a worldwide
phenomenon.2,3
There are a lot of reasons to think that this decline is temporary.
It takes some time to turn all of the unprecedented public and
private R&D investments now taking place into safe and effective
treatments for patients.
In particular, much of the growth in biomedical R&D has
been devoted to new areas of product development, including
genomics, proteomics, imaging and informational technologies,
and many other areas. Because many of these new sciences are
just beginning to emerge from laboratory and investigational
settings, it seems plausible that the large new investments
in biomedical R&D may take many years to pay off as an increase
in the availability of safe and effective products for patients.
This lengthy "translational" process means that it
may still require some years and considerable additional costs
before such an increase occurs.
However, rising costs of product development may be an important
contributor to problems of rising health care costs and problems
of timely access to the most effective modern treatments. Steps
to reduce the time, cost, and uncertainty of developing new
drugs and devices are thus important public health priorities.
For example, the Tufts researchers estimate that drug companies
can achieve a $200 million reduction in total development costs
by reducing clinical phase times by 41 percent, or by increasing
clinical success rates from the current 21.5 percent to approximately
31 percent.4 Millions of Americans
are suffering from diseases that may be curable or at least
manageable as a result of technologies in development now. From
a public health standpoint, making it simpler and more straightforward
to translate all these investments into valuable products can
have a substantial positive impact on the health of the nation,
and can improve access to needed care as well. Making the process
of translating new discoveries into safe and effective treatments
more efficient and quick is thus a high priority for the FDA.
Figure 1
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Manufacturing: Need for Greater
Efficiency in Producing Safe and Effective Medical Products
Another application of the FDA's principle of efficient risk
management is focused on the agency's current standards and
guidance to industry on the way medical products are manufactured,
known as "Current Good Manufacturing Practices." The
CGMP regulations for drugs have not been updated in 25 years.
Meanwhile, best practices in manufacturing technologies and
methods have undergone significant progress over that time,
particularly in other high-tech industries.
For example, the semiconductor industry also has a very low
tolerance for impurities and inaccuracies in production. Through
continuous quality improvement, the semiconductor industry achieved
enormous improvements in production cost and quality, and these
techniques have since been widely adopted in many manufacturing
industries.
But continuous quality improvement in manufacturing hasn't
been the subject of as much attention in the pharmaceutical
industry, even though many experts on manufacturing processes
believe that large savings in production costs could be realized
while maintaining very high standards for purity and accuracy.
The FDA wants to make sure that its regulations are encouraging
such progress. So the FDA's broad-based program is working on
developing new guidance based on the latest science of risk
management and quality assurance. The new standards are being
designed to encourage cost-reducing and precision-enhancing
innovation in manufacturing and technology, and to ensure that
the FDA uses consistent and up-to-date methods, including inspectors
specializing in particular types of production methods.
Chemical and Engineering News reports that, although pharmaceutical
laboratories are working aggressively to produce new drugs,
"Behind the scenes, the industry is hoping to boost its
performance by cutting costs in areas it has basically ignored."
Manufacturing had been on the bottom of the list of concerns
for 15 years in pharmaceuticals and now it is a frontline issue.5
Imports: Need for Safety Oversight
to Catch Up to Quantum Growth in Volume of Entries
Over the past decade, the number of FDA-regulated imports has
increased dramatically. In the past 5 years alone, the number
of import line entries6 has nearly
doubled, growing from 4.2 million in 1997 to 7.8 million in
2002. Approximately two-thirds of these line entries are foods.
Meanwhile, the FDA's capacity to examine imports physically
has not kept pace with the significant growth in the number
of imports of FDA-regulated products. The result is that by
2002, the FDA physically examined less than 1.3 percent of all
entries offered for import into the United States. The FDA has
compensated for the tremendous growth in its regulatory mission
by working with international agencies that export FDA-regulated
products to the United States to leverage off of their efforts,
and by devoting significant new personnel resources to border
examinations. To further enhance import security with limited
resources, the FDA is implementing new regulations to address
threats, improve the agency's ability to target its field resources
to imports that present the most significant risks, respond
more quickly and effectively if an event involving an FDA-regulated
product occurs, and collaborate with other government agencies
and regulated firms to increase security and mitigate threats.
The number of line entries is a measure of the number of places
from which products are flowing into the United States, and
it indicates the relative volume of imported products that are
subject to FDA regulation.
Callout for foods:
CDC estimates that foodborne diseases cause about 76 million
illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths
in the United States each year.
Paul S. Meade, et.al.,
EID Journal, Sept/Oct 1999
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Foods: Foodborne Disease Remains a
Major Public Health Threat
The annual cost of foodborne illness in the United States
each year is estimated to be between $7.7 and $23 billion.7
Officials of the Department of Health and Human Services project
that the reported incidence of foodborne illness may increase
by 10 to 15 percent during the next decade. And changes in production
practices, centralized product distribution, environmental conditions,
and food consumption patterns could be contributing to the emergence
of new microbial threats to health.8
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates
that foodborne diseases cause about 76 million illnesses, 325,000
hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each
year.9
Even these figures may be low due to the number of foodborne
illnesses that go unreported. Some experts estimate that over
40 million cases of foodborne illness go unreported each year.10
The FDA is committed to reducing the incidence of foodborne
illness by greater use of efficient risk management techniques,
such as hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP) strategies.
These efforts are an important part of the agency's strategic
plan.
Efficient Risk Management: FDA's
Objectives
The agency's approach to efficient risk management requires
the use of the most current biomedical, managerial, and economic
science, along with improved standards and FDA-industry communications.
This strategy will reduce unnecessary regulatory burdens, improve
compliance with the law, and achieve greater and faster improvements
in public health through safer, more effective, and more affordable
medical and food technologies. It includes more efficient development
and review processes for a widening variety of drugs, medical
devices, biologics, and food additives, while sustaining the
FDA's gold standards for safety and effectiveness. It also includes
using the best available data and analytic methods to assess
risk and to develop the most effective approaches for inspections
and other compliance and enforcement activities. The FDA will
be pursuing the most cost-effective allocation of its resources
to identify food safety hazards and reduce illness and injury
of food products. And the agency will work to make imports safer
by using a risk-based system to inspections.
The FDA's goal for efficient risk management includes the following
four objectives and strategies:
Objective 1 -- Provide timely, high quality, cost-effective
process for review of new technologies/premarket submissions.
- Reduce avoidable delays and
costs in product approvals through clear expectations and
effective communication of standards to sponsors by: 1) analyzing
root causes of multiple review cycles and establishing steps
to prevent additional cycles when possible and 2) developing
additional agency guidances on innovative and crosscutting
product development where development pathways are particularly
difficult or unclear.
- Initiate the development of a
continuous improvement/quality systems approach to the approval
process throughout premarket review of new applications.
- Direct agency research programs
and develop standards to effectively handle emerging technologies,
especially in areas of pharmacogenomics, gene therapy, and
combination devices. The objective is more efficient and rapid
translation of new scientific developments and breakthroughs
into safe and effective medical products.
Highlights for
Objective 1
Improving the process for developing new medical technologies
is an FDA priority. New technology development presents
uncertainties that increase business risks and costs and
sometimes create barriers to innovation. These factors
can contribute to keeping important new medical products
from people that need them and cause the public to miss
out on the realization of certain public health benefits
of new technology.
National Cancer Institute (NCI) – In May
2003, the FDA and NCI formed a joint task force to address
opportunities for improving the development of new cancer
therapies. This effort will include sponsoring workshops
and collaborative discussions with stakeholders regarding
appropriate clinical trial design for cancer therapies
by type of cancer and stage of disease.
Continuous Marketing Application (CMA) –
The first CMA pilot (a PDUFA initiative) will provide
early review of relevant portions (reviewable units) of
a sponsor's new drug or biologic product application submitted
in advance of the complete application. The goal is to
improve the quality of the information that the agency
receives during the first review cycle and avoid the need
for multiple-cycle reviews. |
Objective 2 -- Provide high quality, cost-effective oversight
of industry manufacturing, processing and distribution to reduce
risk.
- Apply the most current scientific
knowledge about risk management and quality assurance to the
FDA's requirements, including Current Good Manufacturing Practice
(CGMP) inspection, compliance, and enforcement activities.
- Develop new inspection approaches
to more effectively utilize new and existing resources.
- Implement an efficient, risk-based
system to promote the wide availability of safe FDA-regulated
imports by increasing the standards and improving the practices
of source countries and at points of entry into U.S. commerce,
improving detection of noncompliant products, and developing
standards and procedures to maximize the cost-effectiveness
of agency oversight.
Highlights
for Objective 2
The FDA oversees the quality of drug products through
1) the review of information in product applications and
2) inspection of manufacturing facilities. This approach
has protected consumers for over 25 years, yet the FDA
plans to make sure it is up-to-date.
- Enhance expertise by training staff on new
scientific approaches and innovative pharmaceutical
manufacturing technologies.
- Publish guidance on 21 CFR Part 11 to clarify scope,
requirements and application.
- Evaluate mechanisms to communicate deficiencies
to industry, including content, consistency, disclosure,
and education.
- Use emerging science and data analysis to target the
highest risk areas.
- Educate industry on new regulatory approaches
that encourage innovation.
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Objective 3 -- Assure the safety of the U.S. food and cosmetics
supply to protect consumers at the least cost for the public.
- Develop and use new scientific
knowledge and use public health systems to quickly and accurately
identify food safety hazards so that disease risks can be
properly managed.
- Identify appropriate prevention
standards and apply appropriate preventive controls and inspection
and monitoring systems to assure food safety for all Americans.
- Measure results regarding health
outcomes to verify that foodborne illness and injury is being
reduced.
- Consider risk information in
deciding how to manage food imports, whether by: 1) working
with foreign countries and manufacturers to improve compliance
with safe manufacturing abroad as an alternative to detailed
inspections at the border, 2) using better information on
imports to focus border checks of final products that present
significant potential risks, or 3) collaborating with domestic
producers to improve checks on the safety of the ingredients
they use.
Objective 4 -- Develop methodological strategies and analyses
to evaluate options, identify the most effective and efficient
risk management strategies, and optimize regulatory decision-making.
- Develop and evaluate strategies
using scientific data to optimize premarket and postmarket
regulatory decisions.
- Develop timely, first-rate integrated
risk assessment and economic analysis to identify efficient
risk management options for policy makers.
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Footnotes
1J.A. DiMasi, R.W. Hansen, H.G.
Grabowski, The Price of Innovation: New Estimates of Drug Development
Costs, Journal of Health Economics, 835 (2003) 1-35
2CMR International, “Trends
in Submissions and Authorisations” in R&D Briefing
No. 35, The Impact of the Changing Regulatory Environment on
Review Times, October 2002
3EMEA Expects No Rise in 2004 Filings,
SCRIP No. 2827, February 26th 2003
4Tufts CSDD quantifies savings from
boosting new drug R & D efficiency, Tufts Center for the
Study of Drug Development IMPACT Report, Vol 4, No 5, September/October
2002.
5Rick Mullin, Catching Up With Reengineering,
Business, Chemical and Engineering News, June 2, 2003, Vol 81,
No. 22 pp 16-18.
6The number of line entries is used
as an indicator of relative volume of FDA-regulated imported
products. Sources of data include U.S. Census (1986-1993), U.S.
Customs (1994-1996), and FDA OASIS (1997-2002).
7Food and Drug Administration, Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, Food Safety Inspection USDA
Food Safety Inspection Service, “Status Report: Food Safety
Objectives Healthy People 2000.” Accessed at http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~mow/hp2kintr.htmlon
June 20, 2003.
8Donna U. Vogt, “Food Safety
Issues in the 106th Congress,” Congressional Research
Service Issue Brief, November 7, 2000. Accessed at http://www.ncseonline.org/NLE/CRSreports/Agriculture/ag-38.cfmon
June 20, 2003.
9Paul S. Mead et al., “Food-Related
Illness and Death in the United States,” Emerging Infectious
Diseases 5 (5): September-October 1999. Accessed at http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol5no5/mead.htmon
June 20, 2003.
10Donna U. Vogt, “Food Safety
Issues in the 106th Congress,” Congressional Research
Service Issue Brief, November 7, 2000. Accessed at http://www.ncseonline.org/NLE/CRSreports/Agriculture/ag-38.cfmon
June 20, 2003.
Complete FDA Strategic
Plan
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