It’s been an exciting week in the normally staid world of drug safety.  

Last Thursday, FDA launched a public dashboard for FAERS (the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System).  We’ve been calling on FDA to do this for years, so we were quite excited to read the news and take the new dashboard out for a spin.

Apparently, a lot of others were just as excited.  The site almost immediately stopped working and stayed that way for most of Friday. 

Last month, FDA released their quarterly watch list of ongoing drug safety concerns. My colleague Jim wrote a blog post on some of the major talking points around the update, not on the drugs or the risks themselves, but general pharmacovigilance themes. Our post this week focuses on one of the risks that was specifically discussed by FDA on the SGLT-2 class of diabetes drugs. The SGLT-2's had triggered a safety signal for nephrolithiasis (aka kidney stones). Evidex RxSignal analysis had also predicted this safety signal for most of these SGLT-2 drugs, with many of the signals being triggered more than a year prior to this alert.

However, unlike the 12 other safety issues in this same alert, the FDA quickly determined that despite the safety signal shown in the postmarketing data, “no action is necessary at this time, based on available information”. In other words, the FDA does not believe that kidney stones should be disclosed as a risk to the labels of these medications.

Why did the FDA make this determination so quickly? What information did the FDA use?

Earlier this month FDA quietly published a quarterly update to their publicly available “watch list” of ongoing drug safety concerns. The updates are based on Q1 2017 FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) data. You can download a copy of our recent Evidex Alert, covering the new additions, clarifications, and “all clears” so I won’t get into the details in this post. However, it is worth noting that there were fourteen unique drugs, or in some cases entire classes of drugs, that were included in the update. Many of the drugs have been on market for quite a long time and otherwise would be considered to have a well established safety profile. For 8 of the 11 alerts that could be signaled for (3 of the alerts were AEs that were already labeled for), Advera Health’s RxSignal early warning system did its job and picked up on the signal. The remaining alerts either weren't on a RxSignal eligible adverse event, meaning it wasn't a serious event that the FDA typical takes action on, but there was noticable elevated reporting as defined by reporting odds ratios (ROR). 

Canada has long had a more open system for reporting and searching adverse drug events.  They provide an easy to use online form for healthcare providers and consumers to make direct reports, which contrasts significantly to the cumbersome reporting form provided by FDA here in the U.S.   They provide a web-based search tool that enables anyone to search through adverse event reports submitted to Health Canada.  Nothing like that exists from FDA in the U.S.

Now comes word that Canada is taking a step toward something that we’ve long believed to be a crucial factor in improving and increasing adverse event reporting – requiring reporting from healthcare providers. 

A personal note:  About a month ago, we published a blog post titled Drug Safety Progressives.  While 99.9% of the readers understood that this wasn’t a political statement, we did get hit with some great trolling that accused us of, among other things, pushing “Alt-Left Propaganda on a Left Wing Socialist website.”  How or why someone reached that conclusion is beyond me.  Regardless, I’m dedicating today’s blog post to those 0.1% of our readers who troll for an internet fight.  I’m confident that the rest of you will enjoy it too.

We know that with the fake news circulating these days, you may have missed the most important breaking story concerning President Trump in February.  That’s right, he’s taking something to maintain that famous hair – Propecia.

We are pleased to report that our latest major publication, “A Pharmacovigilance Signaling System Based on FDA Regulatory Action and Post-Marketing Adverse Event Reports” was released this week in the esteemed journal “Drug Safety.”  It was published as an online-first feature and will also appear in the April copy of the print version of Drug Safety.

Recently a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), filed at the request of Representative Rosa DeLauro on December 15, 2015 was made public. The report’s focus was to better understand the rate at which drug applications were expedited using “fast track” and “breakthrough therapy” designations and if FDA was fulfilling its duty to properly track and analyze post-marketing monitoring for those drugs.

We were blown away this week by Stat News’ investigation into the blatant underreporting of clinical trials data to the federally mandated ClinicalTrials.gov website.  If you haven’t already read this masterful piece of journalism, please do so. No, really.  Go ahead and read it.  I’ll wait.

Receiving Medwatch emails from FDA are an exciting thing around Advera Health. Though a bit morose, when we see that drug safety warning pop into our Inbox with FDA’s logo, we must admit to getting a little giddy. On Friday, FDA issued their second safety communication around the SGLT2 class of diabetes drugs and a serious (and very costly) side effect of those drugs, a condition called ketoacidosis. Ketoacidosis is a very serious condition that can lead to diabetic coma or even death. In this communication it was revealed that the FDA finally added ketoacidosis as an adverse event to the drugs’ labels, following an initial communication in May that they were evaluating the risk.