Patient Focused Drug Development

The FDA hosted a public meeting this morning to discuss the Patient Focused Drug Development (PFDD) initiative. The meeting was available via webcast, and a transcript will be published on the FDA website. CFS is on the list of candidate diseases to be included in this process, so the meeting was of great relevance to us as patients and advocates.

The goal of the Patient Focused Drug Development Initiative is to create a more systematic way for FDA to collect and use patient perspectives on the burden of disease and the risk/benefit ratio of treatments. While patient input is used in a variety of ways in the drug approval process, it is not as systematic and comprehensive as is needed. Dr. Janet Woodcock, the director of FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, explained that FDA wants to understand patients’ perspectives on the burden of illness, how it affects daily life, how treatments affect those symptoms and outcomes, and what degree of risk is acceptable for the benefits. Every patient has a different experience of disease burden and tolerance for risk, so collecting single patient input on these questions may not capture the full spectrum of patient experience. The selection of twenty conditions (from the proposed list of thirty-nine) is intended to be a pilot program to help the FDA figure out how best to collect this input more generally.

Dr. Teresa Mullin, Director of the Office of Planning and Informatics, explained that making a determination of the balance between treatment risk and benefit requires an analysis of the condition and the current treatment options. Patients can speak to the clinical manifestations of the condition that have the most significant impact on them, as well as other aspects of the condition that affect daily life. Patients can also speak to how those impacts change with disease progression, and share their own experiences of the current standard of care and all treatments being used (including non-pharmacological treatments). While many of these issues have been considered and discussed from the clinicians’ point of view, it is very common for patients to have a very different view of the symptoms they feel most affect daily life or how well treatments work (or not) over time. Dr. Mullin said that the objective of this PFDD process is to create a systematic way to collect broad patient input and capture it in a usable and useful format to be used by review panels when considering products for approval.

In discussing why the FDA selected the thirty-nine candidate diseases, Dr. John Jenkins, Director of the Office of New Drugs, said that collective patient community input was essential throughout the approval process from the oversight of trials through post-approval safety issues. He pointed out that the patient perspective is very different from that of consumer safety advocates. For example, patients with asthma have a very different risk tolerance with inhaler medications compared to safety advocates who do not have asthma. Several division directors explained why their divisions had proposed specific diseases, including Dr. Theresa Michele from the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Rheumatology Products. Dr. Michelle is also FDA’s ex officio representative to the CFS Advisory Committee, and she spoke about the severity of CFS and why her division recommended its inclusion in the PFDD process.

Most of the remaining time of the meeting was devoted to hearing public comment. In an attempt to give everyone time to speak, comments were limited to two minutes but this was not enforced by the meeting moderator. Patients and advocates representing diverse conditions spoke about why their disease should be part of this process, including Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, alopecia, ALS, Alzheimer’s, amyloidosis, arthritis, angioedema, Batten disease, blood cancers, brain tumors, dystonia, gastroparesis, hereditary cancers, inflammatory bowel disorders, interstitial cystitis, kidney diseases, lung diseases, melanoma, migraine,  muscular dystrophy (including Duchenne), and narcolepsy. Four members of our CFS community spoke: Mary Dimmock, Joe Landson, Amy Squires, and Mary Schweitzer.

Several things struck me during all the public testimony. First, I found it heart-breaking to listen to so much suffering. Dealing with CFS, we sometimes have blinders on and I think we forget how many other millions of people are suffering from poorly understood diseases with no treatment and no help. One man with ALS said he would celebrate if he had some of the other diagnoses on the proposed disease list, and did not understand why ALS was missing from the list. A woman with gastroparesis described her suffering in brutal detail, and drew a parallel between her experience and having the stomach flu every day. How many times have we CFS patients described our illness as having the worst influenza every day? It quickly became clear that for all the advances in medical care, there are too many diseases and too many patients and too many families suffering.

Second, a number of advocates pointed out that by selecting individual diseases, FDA had caused a “disease war,” in which groups were competing to get on the list. As an alternative, they proposed hosting PFDD meetings on body systems (lungs, nervous system, immune system, etc) or other factors (such as severity or availability of treatments). They reasoned that the combination approach would allow more diseases to be represented and capture more diverse patient input.

My personal opinion is that this would be a mistake. This is intended to be a pilot process to collect input that will be useful to drug review panels. I do not believe that a systems approach will collect the level of detail on CFS or other illnesses that is necessary for reviewers. How can a meeting on gastointestinal disorders capture a sufficient level of detail on patients with Crohn’s disease and gastropareisis that can be used in the drug approval process for a treatment for only one condition? And what about diseases like CFS and amyloidosis that do not have a single body system “home”? I believe FDA needs to drill down to a fine level of detail in collecting and understanding patient perspectives, so I hope they will not start combining conditions in an effort to cram more disease groups into these meetings.

Your input is necessary now! The public docket to submit comments on the disease list closes on November 1st. If you can, please write to FDA and give your perspective on how CFS meets the following criteria:

• Disease areas that are chronic, symptomatic, or affect functioning and activities of daily living;
• Disease areas that reflect a range of severity;
• Disease areas for which aspects of the disease are not formally captured in clinical trials;
• Disease areas that have a severe impact on identifiable subpopulations (such as children or the elderly);
• Disease areas that represent a broad range in terms of size of the affected population
• Disease areas for which there are currently no therapies or very few therapies, or the available therapies do not directly affect how a patient feels, functions, or survives.

FDA will take several months to review the collected input and decide upon the first twelve diseases for PFDD meetings in 2013 through 2015.