Faculty Bibliography

Life-cycle management of drug safety issues requires vigilant postmarket monitoring. Increasingly, however, this concept also includes direct management of how drugs are used, to minimize risks and maximize benefits. Legislative proposals from Senators Kennedy and Enzi, as well as plans offered by the Institute of Medicine, are promoting the more widespread adoption of risk-management plans to mitigate a broader range of safety-related issues. These proposals seek to modify physician prescribing patterns to tip risk-benefit balancing in individual prescription decisions. Yet these policies would do nothing to mitigate the drug safety-related issues that have been the source of recent public interest

How the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) responds to criticism of its drug safety process will determine whether drug safety actually improves. Propping up the Office of Drug Safety with more bureaucratic prominence or adding new requirements to the preapproval process will add to the cost of drug development and not make drugs safer. New information tools can dramatically improve postmarketing surveillance and collection of data on safety. This information could then be used to reach more definitive regulatory conclusions sooner. New incentives will be needed to entice payers and product developers to work on building a broader, more robust system for collecting data on drug safety