From tomorrow’s WSJ:
When people age, the main valve carrying blood out of the heart becomes brittle. As this aortic valve narrows, it can cause debilitating heart failure, and even death.
Fixing the problem in the United States requires open-heart surgery. In Europe, the problem can be repaired using a tiny catheter that introduces a replacement valve through an artery in the leg. In July, a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel said this device should also be approved for sale in the U.S. It is expected to reach patients by year end—more than four years after it first hit the market in Europe.
This is an all too familiar story, the FDA impeding useful innovations in the U.S. Entrepreneurs here are forced to test promising medical devices in costly animal studies for years before they can advance their products into clinical trials. When clinical studies get started, the FDA is asking for longer and larger trials that increasingly mirror hurdles proposed for new drugs.
In response, American device makers are moving their business overseas. Between 2004 and 2010, more than half of all innovative devices were first approved in Europe. Because more devices now launch in Europe, companies increasingly study the products there. In 2004, 86.9% of all medical-device studies listed in www.clinicaltrials.gov were being carried out in the U.S. By 2009, only 45% of clinical trials were run here.
Manufacturing is also moving overseas as a consequence. Many emerging-market countries including China, India and Brazil have enacted “country of origin” rules. These laws require a marketed device to be made in the same country where it received regulatory approval. Companies know they’ll get European approval long before they get the FDA’s nod. So if they want to market their devices in these emerging markets, they need to make sure manufacturing facilities are also located in the European Union.
The FDA has been obsessed from its beginning about the snake oil salesman making a living off the rubes in the country, who are too illiterate and ignorant to understand the risks that are self-evident to smarter lawyers. Thank goodness they protected everybody from the scourge of Vioxx.
The same goes with my personal medical device, and the supplies that go with it, all of which cost much more than they should, not just because of the lawyers at the FDA, but also because the lawyers in Congress have not seen fit to grant a safe harbor for drugs and devices approved by the FDA so they do not get sued by other lawyers from Mississipi.
I am not suggesting one buy one’s devices or drugs from, say, Ghana, or any place that has zero or slight coverage on Wintercow’s map. But WC is correct in giving the Europeans credit for restraint.
Apologies to all lawyers who happen to be for freedom.
Agencies of the federal government seem to have a very much different concept of time than anyone else on earth. It takes the Supreme Court many months to make a decision. The National Transportation Safety Board can take years to determine cause of an accident. An example of more bureaucratic glacial inertia is here: http://nailheadtom.blogspot.com/2011/08/alaska-wood-bison-update.html