By Ed Hudgins
On Thursday, Oct 26, the Senate Committee on Aging will hold a hearing on “Unlocking Hope: Access to Therapies for People with Rare, Progressive, and Serious Diseases” at 8:30 a.m., followed by a 9:00 press conf. The venue is 106 Dirksen Senate Office Building.
This hearing is in support of the bipartisan Promising Pathway Act (PPA), S-1906, to reform the Food and Drug Administration.
Not, strictly speaking, a longevity bill but opens the way for the FDA to consider aging treatments.
It takes about 10-12 years and $3 billion to bring new treatments from researchers to patients. FDA’s certification regulations cause most delays. Among benefits, PPA would:
– Allow provisional approval of treatments tested as safe but still in clinical trials, allowing those suffering from serious ailments but who can’t get into those trials access to health- and life-saving meds;
– Require real world data on patient experiences with treatments to be logged in a database, allowing sponsors to secure quicker approval for beneficial treatments & alerting healthcare providers to treatments that could help patients;
– Open the door for innovative ways to test proposed treatments, cutting costs and approval time, and spurring innovative treatments.
– This is an opportunity to help replace our current “sick-care” system with a true healthcare system!
Edward Hudgins, Ph.D.(ehudgins@humanachievementalliance.org) is the founder of the Human Achievement Alliance. An earlier version of this article appeared on LinkedIn. Reprinted with permission
