Drug industry presses FDA on
diet
pills
September 18, 2004
By Rob Stein
Eyeing a potential gold mine in the global obesity epidemic, the pharmaceutical industry has launched a massive drive to develop new diet pills and an intense campaign to persuade the government to make it easier to get weight-loss drugs onto the market.
Dozens of companies are testing scores of experimental compounds designed to curb appetite, block weight gain and burn fat. Although most are in the earliest stages, many have moved into preliminary tests in people, and a handful have progressed further. One -- called rimonabant, which blocks a pathway in the brain that produces the craving for food -- is generating excitement and could make it onto pharmacy shelves by the end of 2005.
"It's a hot field," said Donny Wong, an analyst at Decision Resources Inc., a market research firm in Waltham, Mass. "Every large pharmaceutical company has an obesity program, and if they don't have one, they are trying to get one."
To encourage and prepare for the flood of drugs that could emerge, the Food and Drug Administration has initiated its first review in nearly a decade of how it assesses new obesity medications. The industry -- joined by some obesity experts and advocates alarmed by the burgeoning health crisis -- is pressing the agency to demand less stringent testing and to speed approval of new agents.
"Our feeling is they have a different standard for weight-loss drugs than they do for other drugs for important health problems," said Jonathan Hauptman of the pharmaceutical maker Hoffmann-La Roche in Nutley, N.J. "We'd like them to be treated on a level playing field. We'd like people to start thinking about weight loss not as a cosmetic issue but as a medical benefit."
The push is occurring as more scientists and doctors have become convinced that overcoming the body's imperative to stockpile fat will require an assortment of drugs, mixed and matched in various combinations, and that many patients will be taking these cocktails for years -- perhaps for life -- along with dieting and exercising. That could create a market akin to those for other major chronic illnesses.
But the intensifying pressure for new obesity drugs is raising fears among some consumer advocates who worry that it could produce little more than the next round of marginally effective, unsafe diet pills.
"These drugs have a 40- to 50-year history of clearly doing more harm than good," said Larry Sasich of the Public Citizen Health Research Group. "None of them have ever been shown that they can be taken safely for a long enough time to reduce deaths from chronic illness caused by obesity."
Source:www.startribune.com
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