Charity urges EU to give kids cancer drugs access

“Children with cancer ‘denied drugs because of EU rules’,” reports the BBC. This and other headlines in the media are based on a press release issued by the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), London. The ICR has called for urgent changes in European Union (EU) regulations. It says pharmaceutical companies are often granted exemptions from carrying out trials of treatments in people under the age of 18. This in turn means that children can’t be offered the latest cancer drugs, the ICR says, because their safety and effectiveness hasn’t been tested. Under current EU rules, drugs for cancers that only occur in adults can obtain a “class waiver” which means they are exempted from carrying out trials in children. However, the ICR argues that while many adult cancers (such as lung cancer) do not have direct equivalents in children, this doesn’t mean that adult cancer drugs can’t be effective in children’s cancers. Modern cancer drugs are often designed against specific molecular mechanisms – for example they target cancers with a particular mutation rather than for a particular cancer type – and these mechanisms may be common to different cancers. For example, mutations in the gene ALK can cause lung cancer in adults (and other cancers). Mutations in ALK can also cause a cancer called neuroblastoma (cancer of the nerve cells) in children. The ICR says some potentially important cancer drugs have been given a waiver from testing in children, even thou...
Source: NHS News Feed - Category: Consumer Health News Tags: Cancer Medical practice QA articles Source Type: news