Individual Patient Expanded Access: Developing Principles For A Structural And Regulatory Framework

Abstract

Individual patient expanded access, sometimes termed “compassionate use,” refers to situations where access to a drug still in the development process is granted to patients on a case-by-case basis outside of a clinical trial, prior to completion of mandated clinical trials and approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This typically involves filing a single patient or emergency investigational new drug (IND) request with the Food and Drug Administration and voluntary release of the drug by the manufacturer. Generally, the following criteria must be met: there is reasonable expectation of meaningful benefit despite the absence of definitive clinical trial data, the patient has a serious or life-threatening condition, there are no comparable or satisfactory treatment alternatives, and there are no suitable clinical trials for the drug available to the patient. This form of expanded access, which is the focus of this paper, is different from the situation in which a drug is discharged to a large group of needy patients in the interval between successful phase 3 trials and presumed FDA approval, a strategy often termed a “treatment” IND or protocol, which was initially used in the 1980s for releasing zidovudine to patients with acquired immune deficiency syndrome. A Call to Action: The Importance of Expanded Access Programs The Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at the Brookings Institution recently invited senior leaders from several pharmaceutical companies, two bioethicists, a senior FDA representative, and a patient advocate to share experiences and discuss organizational strategies related to expanded access (see acknowledgements). A driving factor for this meeting was a recent flurry of highly public cases of desperate patients seeking access to experimental drugs, which lead to social media campaigns and media coverage.