Most people would be appalled to hear that a pharmaceutical company is withholding a potentially life-saving drug from a dying 7-year-old child. The drug isn’t on the market yet, but could be administered under a “compassionate use” exception from the Food and Drug Administration. The situation is a lot more complex than “big mean company keeps drug away from little kid.”
The 7-year-old is currently being treated at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. He’s been seriously ill since he was an infant, eventually going into remission from cancer that began in his kidneys and spread to other parts of his body. He has received a bone marrow transplant, and is critically ill from a virus that people who aren’t on anti-rejection drugs would fight off easily. The drug that he needs to defeat the virus without further destroying his kidneys is the oral form of an antiviral called brincidofovir. The problem is that oral brincidofovir, made by a company called Chimerix, isn’t supposed to go on the market until 2016.
Drugs that are still considered “experimental” can go to patients who will die without them: during earlier phases of testing the drug, Chimerix granted hundreds of exceptions. They ended that program, and say that they will not make any more exceptions. One company executive told CNN that even employees’ own family members who could benefit from the drug can’t get it.
The company claims that evaluating compassionate use cases and manufacturing the drug for those patients wouldn’t be an effective use of company resources. Chimerix only has fifty employees. They estimate that it costs $50,000 to provide it to one patient, since insurance generally doesn’t cover experimental treatments. If the company makes one exception due to a social media campaign, would hundreds of other such campaigns follow?
The argument from Chimerix effectively is, “If we give the drug to little Josh, we’ll have to give it to everyone else, too.”
Company denies drug to dying child [CNN]
Save Josh [Facebook]
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist
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