Learning about European drug-registration strategy
一、It is far too early to say if the new arrangements for the regulation of drugs in the European Union are better. The European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products has been finding its feet slowly. Financial difficulties have dogged EMEA from the start, and this has resulted in "delayed investments and recruitment, despite the rapid increase in workload". The European subsidy for 1995 was reduced in the European Parliament by about 3million ecu. For 1996 EMEA proposed a subsidy of 17 million ecu, reduced to 14 million by the Commission. "Any further reduction would prevent the Agency from meeting its statutory obligations", EMEA stated on Sept 20.
二、Nonetheless staff now number 55, compared with the half dozen this time last year, and numbers will have trebled by the end of 1996. A list of 1600 outside experts has been drawn up. So, what are all these people going to do?
三、At a one-day seminar organised by Management Forum in London last week, three of the four speakers, all from the UK drug-licencing system, had involvement with EMEA, and it was agency plans that they were talking about. A recurrent theme was the need for the industry, at whose registration staff the seminar was targeted, to think strategically when choosing which approval route to go for.
四、Prescribing habits are not standardized in Europe. Anthony C Cartwright, when speaking on mutual recognition procedures, suggested that companies seek “market intelligence on the major indications, dosage contraindications and warnings for related or similar products” before drafting a Euro-style “summary of product characteristics”(SPC). Make too many claims for the drug in an SPC and you might succeed in one country but come unstuck later on with another. There are special difficulties with vaccines, where usage will be strongly tied to national public health policy.
五、A vaccine made by recombinant technology would have to go down the new centralised procedure. David B Jefferys conceded that progress with this part of the European system had been slow, and he foresaw only about 20 applications being under scrutiny by next January. Although much of the EMEA’s work will be to do with pharmacovigilance, the force behind European licencing is a free market in goods, that market being 380 million people, rather than, at least directly, the public health of the fifteen member populations of the EU. The seminar left the impression that non-commercial interested parties will better judge EMEA performance when there is more experience with appeals against negative decisions and with the resolution of conflict when an application approved in one country is refused in another.
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