Jan 18, 2023
Drug regulatory agencies around the world, like the United States' Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the United Kingdom's Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the European Union's European Medicines Agency (EMA) are largely financed by fees taken from Big Pharma, calling into question their independence from the companies they are supposed to regulate. Dr. Maryanne Demasi, who investigated the proportion of drug regulator budgets derived from Big Pharma in a study for The BMJ, noted that patients and doctors "expect drug regulators to provide an unbiased, rigorous assessment of investigational medicines before they hit the market." "But do they have sufficient independence from the companies they are meant to regulate?" she wrote. (Related: FDA commissioners demand new tools to fight online "misinformation.") According to Demasi's investigation, over the past decades, regulatory agencies like the