Aduhelm: FDA 'probably the worst drug approval decision in recent US history'

 

(CNN) Dr. Aaron Kesselheim had been on an advisory committee for the US Food and Drug Administration for a half-dozen years, but he had never been to a meeting like this one.

The FDA establishes advisory committees to assist the federal agency with one of its most important duties: deciding whether to approve the distribution of new drugs. The stakes of these decisions are enormous. Based on the outcome of the FDA's deliberations, patients may gain access to lifesaving medicines, and manufacturers may reap billions in profits. Kesselheim, a professor at Harvard Medical School, was one of the members of this committee because of his expertise on pharmaceuticals that address diseases of the brain, including Alzheimer's, the irreversible, progressive brain disorder that destroys memory and thinking skills, and eventually causes death. Alzheimer's is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States.

The public meeting, conducted as an all-day video call on November 6, 2020, concerned the application for aducanumab, a drug that would be marketed under the name Aduhelm by the company Biogen, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Aduhelm, if effective, would address one of the most pressing needs in modern medicine: to slow the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. 

Research into Alzheimer's treatments has long been an exercise in frustration, with no new drugs approved since 2003. The field of Alzheimer's research had proved so difficult that it was dubbed by some with the macabre nickname of the "Valley of Death."

In light of this record, and the need to improve it, Kesselheim was looking forward to examining the prospects for Biogen's new drug. "The great thing about advisory committees is that they are independent, and they don't have a stake in the outcome," he said. "We were just an independent group providing their opinion."

As in all advisory committee meetings, this one included several representatives of the FDA and of the applying pharmaceutical company. Dr. Billy Dunn, the director of neuroscience at the FDA, spoke at length on the call, and Samantha Budd Haeberlein, a senior vice president of Biogen, led the representatives for the company. What was unusual about this meeting, though, according to Kesselheim, was the apparent relationship between the FDA and company representatives.

"There was a strange dynamic, compared to the other advisory committee meetings I've attended," Kesselheim said. "Usually there's some distance between the FDA and the company, but on this one the company and the FDA were fully in line with each other in support of the drug."

Dunn in particular was outspoken in his support for the effectiveness of the drug, calling some of the evidence in its favor a "home run," while opponents of approval described the same evidence as inconclusive or worse. Dunn noted further that the FDA "has determined that it is appropriate to exercise the broadest flexibility in applying the statutory standards for these conditions."

From a regulatory perspective, drugs can work in two ways: They can work to treat disease or they can address a surrogate measure for the disease. Take heart attacks, for example. A drug can directly reduce the chances of heart attack or it can address a surrogate for heart attack -- like cholesterol.

At the November meeting, according to Kesselheim, the issue was treatment of Alzheimer's itself, not any surrogate. "The discussion at the committee related to the clinical benefits of the drug" -- that is, whether it slowed the cognitive decline of Alzheimer's patients, he said.

Most of the meeting was devoted to analysis of Biogen's own studies of the effectiveness of Aduhelm. The results were not promising in terms of clinical outcomes. Indeed, two of Biogen's major studies of people taking Aduhelm had been shut down before they were completed because they showed no significant benefit to patients. (Aduhelm, which is injected intravenously, also caused significant side effects, including brain swelling in about a third of patients. Brain swelling, at a minimum, can produce painful headaches as well as more serious problems, including, in rare cases, death.)

In light of this, the advisory committee voted, with one member voting uncertain but no one dissenting, to recommend that the FDA reject the drug.

Seven months later, in June, the FDA gave Biogen final approval to treat patients with Aduhelm in all stages of Alzheimer's disease. Reflecting the confidence in its judgment, the agency even acted on an accelerated basis. 

 

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The financial implications are huge as well. Aduhelm will be extremely expensive, as an intravenous treatment that will cost about $56,000 per year, plus several thousand more in related expenses. Given the number of Alzheimer's patients in the United States, the cost for widespread use of this treatment could quickly run into the many billions of dollars -- much of which would go to Biogen and its partner in the project, Eisai, a Japanese pharmaceutical company. If Aduhelm is approved as a treatment by Medicare, which is currently weighing the issue, the taxpayers will pay much of the tab.

At its core, though, the controversy about Aduhelm raises a fundamental question: Did the FDA approve a drug that doesn't help people -- and if so, why?

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