The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has gone on to announce the establishment of a new advisory committee that will help to evaluate potential treatments when to comes to genetic metabolic diseases.
The Genetic Metabolic Diseases Advisory Committee will go on to advise the FDA on products that should be used for the diagnosis, prevention, as well as treatment of genetic metabolic diseases under the Division of Rare Diseases and Medical Genetics, which was established in 2020.
It is well to be noted that genetic metabolic diseases happen to be conditions that go on to disrupt an individual’s metabolism, which is the mechanism that is responsible for shifting food into energy and eliminating toxins from the body.
Apparently, most of such types of diseases happen to be rare, which includes Hurler syndrome, Gaucher disease, as well as Tay-Sachs disease.
The committee will go on to provide FDA-independent, knowledgeable advice along with recommendations on technical, scientific, as well as policy issues with regards to the medical products for these diseases. Director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research’s (CDER) Office of Rare Diseases, Paediatrics, Urologic, and Reproductive Medicine (ORPURM), Janet Maynard, went on to say that drug development when it comes to these conditions comes with unique and complex challenges, and hence few treatments are available to patients.
Termed as a necessary part of the FDA’s work, advisory committees enable the FDA to have extremely invaluable input from clinicians, academia, patients, industry experts, caregivers, as well as other external stakeholders when it comes to evaluating the probable advantages and challenges pertaining to the new therapy, remarked the director of the CDER, Patrizia Cavazzoni.
Along with the nine voting members, which includes the committee chairperson, the committee will go on to have experts in numerous areas of metabolic genetics, such as carbohydrate disorders, amino acid disorders, as well as organic acidemias.
Moreover, the experts when it comes to the management of inborn challenges of metabolism, translational science, small population trial design, peadiatrics, epidemiology, statistics, and related specialties will also be a part of it. It is well to be noted that all individuals who happen to be nominated as scientific members of the committee have to be technically qualified experts when it comes to their relevant fields and also come with experience interpreting complex data.
Apart from this, the committee will also go on to have a consumer representative as well as an industry representative, while non-federal members will go on to serve as either special government employees or else non-voting representatives, thereby following an invitation so as to serve for up to four years.