A surprising court decision this past May has advanced an effortto allow terminally ill people to purchase experimental drugsafter initial safety testing but before they have been shownto work. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals forthe D.C. Circuit was considering a lawsuit by the Abigail Alliance,a patient-advocacy group, against the Food and Drug Administration(FDA). Two members of the panel ruled that patients with life-threateningand otherwise untreatable diseases have a constitutional rightto seek experimental treatments for which efficacy is not yetestablished and that the government cannot interfere unlessit . . . [Full Text of this Article]
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Dr. Okie is a contributing editor of the Journal.
An interview with Mr. William Schultz, a partner at the law firm Zuckerman Spaeder and a former deputy commissioner for policy at the FDA, can be heard at www.nejm.org.
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