FDA made 22 approvals for 2016. In 2017, it did 23 approvals so far, and we've barely passed the half mark of this year. So, they've been quite busy. Let's briefly look at what it's all about.
Asher Mullard (2017) recently wrote a brief in Nature Reviews providing the entire list of drugs approved by the FDA in the first 6 months of 2017. To be honest, I assumed most of the drugs would be for cancer treatment, but I was pleasantly surprised to be proven otherwise.
Some of the indications of these drugs are:
- idiopathic chronic constipation
- muscular dystrophy (DMD)
- plaque psoriasis
- different carcinomas
- atopic dermatitis
- ALS
- osteoporosis
- rheumatoid arthritis
- and more. [source]
Most of the drugs are characterized by specificity, which is really important, in my view. This is one of the underlying differences between medicine and non-medicine (alternative and complementary), which often put all diseases under a single umbrella (say: inflammation (very unspecific) is the mother of all diseases, spinal misalignments, perturbation of CHI-QI, fill in with your preferred fantasy).
Ok, medicine is not perfect, but at least it's specific, verifiable (testable) and falsifiable. Anyhow, I won't diverge because this is not the purpose of the post.
Important to point out is that some new cancer vaccines (for melanoma) show promises and that FDA approved the first new sickle cell drug in 20 years: a pharmaceutical grade L-glutamine. It would be nice to see how this is different when compared to over the counter L-glutamine; a purity test of the supplement-available forms would be interesting.
Please see the following link for the full list of drugs, the companies behind them and some notes from the author - Asher Mullard (2017):
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Cristi Vlad, Self-Experimenter and Author