The challenge is to develop evidence as quickly as possible without compromising standards. Anytime there’s an unmet medical need, the tendency is to blame the Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory process. But if we don’t know what works, and what doesn’t, we’ll waste time and money on treatments that won’t help and may harm. Even if a vaccine is discovered and approved, the pandemic won’t end unless most Americans get vaccinated, which will require confidence in the product’s safety and efficacy.

The FDA has been using its expertise to help drugmakers develop evidence faster. The agency has issued 60 guidance and other documents for Covid, giving detailed advice on how to speed up development. Thanks to the FDA’s guidance, large, well-designed vaccine trials are underway and moving at an unprecedented pace. Moderna and Pfizer’s vaccine programs have enrolled more than 25,000 patients in four weeks. (One of us, Dr. Gottlieb, serves on the board of Pfizer.)

This “warp speed” approach to vaccine development—a concept that originated with FDA career staff—could be applied to developing other therapeutics. Most of the potentially beneficial treatments are in limited supply, so doctors are forced to ration them. It makes sense to increase clinical trial capacity to include more patients and collect rigorous information on how well these therapies are working.

Take convalescent plasma: Doctors skim antibodies from patients who have recovered from Covid and give them to people who are sick. The theory is that some aspects of the immune response are portable between patients. About 70,000 patients have been dosed with such plasma.

The FDA is granting an emergency-use authorization for plasma, despite concerns last week from public-health leaders at the National Institutes of Health about the limits of the evidence. The decision would have a stronger foundation if patients had participated in a randomized study that looked at whether patients who received plasma fared better than those who didn’t.

To reduce some of the uncertainty, we should expand the NIH Covid trial networks by running more large, practical trials like the U.K.’s Recovery Trial. Recovery, an acronym for Randomised Evaluation of Covid-19 Therapy, randomly assigns patients to experimental treatments using a clear protocol.

Data collection is limited to the variables most important for measuring whether a treatment is safe and effective—say, whether a patient avoids a ventilator. Limiting information allows more hospitals to participate without further straining doctors and other health-care workers. Since most patients will receive one of the experimental therapies, not a placebo, it’s easier to convince patients to enroll.

It is also important to focus clinical-trial capacity on the most promising treatments. One obstacle to faster enrollment is the large number of trials competing for patients. Too many poorly conceived studies are absorbing patients that could be enrolled in better trials.

Some of the potential therapies clearly hold more promise than others. The NIH Covid networks have prioritized at least three immune modulators and several monoclonal antibody treatments. But trial capacity is limited and many more compounds are being evaluated only in smaller or nonrandomized trials. This means slower progress on avenues such as anti-inflammatory drugs. Yet trials on drugs with little promise such as hydroxychloroquine were diverting resources from better opportunities.

In a public-health emergency, drug development can advance more quickly if scarce resources, including patients, can be focused on the most promising therapeutics. The administration could support the equivalent of the Defense Production Act for drug research and development to help public-health agencies expand clinical trial capacity and direct it toward high-quality studies of priority treatments.

The pressure to find effective treatments for Covid-19 is enormous. All the more reason to rely on FDA expertise to steer the focus toward the most promising options and get patients the clear evidence, and effective treatments, they deserve.

Dr. Gottlieb is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and was commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, 2017-19. Dr. McClellan is the director of the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy at Duke University and was FDA commissioner, 2002-04. They are board members and advisers for several health-care companies involved in the Covid response.

WSJ Opinion: Can Schools Reopen Safely?

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WSJ Opinion: Can Schools Reopen Safely?