[Lecturer’s Name]
Summary of Andrea's case:
- Andrea is at the threshold of death unless some miracle medicine helps her.
- She is suffering from ovarian cancer.
- Her doctor has advised her to use a medicine which is still in the clinical trial phase.
- As she doesn’t have much time left, she is also willing to use that drug although she knows that the drug is not in the clinical trial phase thus should not be used on patients. In short it is just so risky.
- BioMarin is still conducting the trials and does not want to offer the medicine as they say that the risk is just so high.
- According to a CNN report, “The California pharmaceutical company BioMarin makes one version of these drugs called BMN 673. Earlier this year, the company presented very early data on this experimental drug at a large cancer conference.”.
- Andrea started a petition as FDA has approved this case under the “Compassionate Use” or the “Extended Access” of the medicine. This petition has been voted in her favor by 234,838 supporters. This petition is now closed .
- The hospital says that many other large companies have also almost completed trials for some medicines for the same cause so they ask the patient to go to them instead of this one as it may also cause increase in the speed of the death to come.
New Approach in Pharma - Transparency Life Sciences
Although being transparent may have some great information to be shared to the world which may increase the rate of success and minimize the risk factor in the clinical trials but the transparency may also cause wrong usage of information by doctors who may use the information for their private practices and other such illegal acts.
The other two approaches of Collaborative Intelligence and convergence of information seems good ones if applied efficiently. Reduced cycle times and reduced error rates will help in the saving of lives of many in need.
Work Cited
Carter, Carol. Petitioned Jean-Jacques Bienaime. 2014 <http://www.change.org/p/biomarin-
pharmaceutical-give-andrea-sloan-andi-sloan-access-to-the-cancer-drug-that-could-save-her-life>.
Hudson, William. In cancer drug battle, both sides appeal to ethics. 2013.
<http://edition.cnn.com/2013/09/28/health/compassionate-drug-use/>.
