Orphan drug development is progressing too slowly

Abstract

AIMS: To assess the methodological quality of OMP dossiers and to discuss possible reasons for the small number of products licensed. METHODS: Information about orphan drug designation and approval was obtained from the website of the European Commission-Enterprise and Industry DG and from the European Public Assessment Reports. RESULTS: Out of 255 OMP designations, only 18 were approved (7.1%). Their dossiers often showed methodological limitations such as inappropriate clinical design, lack of active comparator where available and use of surrogate end-points. CONCLUSIONS: The paucity of European incentives for manufacturers and the poor documentation underpinning the applications may have limited the number of new OMP. The over 5000 rare diseases awaiting therapy are an important public health issue.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 70 citations exist upstream.