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Submitted via IRC for AzumaHazuki
[Purdue Pharma] announced this week that the US Food and Drug Administration has granted fast-track status to its investigational drug nalmefene hydrochloride (HCl), an injectable, emergency treatment intended to rescue people suspected of having an opioid overdose. Purdue suggests that nalmefene HCl’s effects last longer than the similar emergency opioid antagonist naloxone. As such, the company hopes nalmefene HCl will out-compete naloxone at reversing overdoses from the most highly potent opioid, namely fentanyl, which is currently driving the alarming numbers of opioid overdose deaths. The FDA’s fast-track status will speed the development and regulatory review of the drug.
[...] In the statement this week, Purdue once again side-stepped any involvement in initiating the epidemic, focusing solely on illicit drug use. Purdue’s president and CEO, Craig Landau was quoted as describing the problem simply as “Fentanyl and illicit opioid deaths continue to increase in the United States, fueled increasingly by overdoses of this class of compounds.”
[...] Purdue announced that it doesn’t intend to make money on the new drug. “As part of Purdue’s commitment to advance meaningful solutions to address the opioid crisis, the company will work to bring forward this option with the commitment not to profit from any future sales of this drug.”
[...] Still, according to internal discussions at Purdue that were made public in a lawsuit brought by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Purdue and members of the wealthy Sackler family that owns the company had carefully researched the money-making potential of treatments aimed at reversing the epidemic.
An un-redacted section of the lawsuit describes a secret plan called Project Tango, which explored Purdue’s expansion into selling treatment options.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Sunday March 17 2019, @03:58PM
While we're on the car analogies, this action is like the tire shop inventing and stocking up on run flat tires in the midst of a plan to spread bags of nails on nearby roads.
This situation calls for some strongarm negotiations. Like, maybe Purdue should release this antidote to the public domain, in exchange for reduced damages and jail time for having precipitated an opioid addiction epidemic. Antidotes aren't enough to make up for what they did, but they are of some value, and we don't want to discourage their creation. All this is presuming that Purdue really did come up with this antidote themselves, and didn't mooch it off the discoveries of a public university, as happens so often in this industry.