Pfizer is playing a new role in the dramas that often
surround drug shortages. While manufacturing issues at its Hospira unit
have sometimes been responsible for hospital drug shortages, Pfizer is
now trying to fill a serious shortfall after Teva Pharmaceutical
discontinued production of a chemo drug used to cure children of serious
cancers.
It is ramping up production of vincristine—often used with
other drugs to treat leukemia, brain tumors and lymphomas—after Teva in
July notified
the FDA that it had made the “business decision” to discontinue
production. Its move has left pediatric oncologists scrambling to find
supplies.
“Due to a competitor’s outage, we are expediting additional
shipments of this critical product over the next few weeks to support
three to four times our typical production output. Pfizer is committed
to providing this important medicine to patients,” Pfizer said today in
an email.
The New York Times reports that vincristine is so widely used that the shortage is affecting clinical trials as well as treatments.
“Vincristine is our water. It’s our bread and butter. I
can’t think of a disease in childhood cancer that doesn’t use
vincristine,” Yoram Unguru, M.D., a pediatric oncologist at the Herman
and Walter Samuelson Children’s Hospital at Sinai in Baltimore, tells
the NYT.
Teva did not respond to the newspaper about its decision to
discontinue vincristine, a drug that has been on and off the FDA
shortage list for years. With margins on generics having gotten very
thin in recent years, many drugmakers have given up production of
products where they are not dominant in the marketplace. There are
currently 202 drug discontinuations listed on the FDA Drug Shortages
website.
Playing the hero in a drug shortage is a turnabout for Pfizer, which has been under pressure to upgrade several plants after manufacturing issues left certain drugs in very short supply. Problems at a Hospira plant in Kansas led to shortages at hospitals of some injected pain meds. Issues at another Pfizer facility that makes injectors resulted in shortages of Mylan’s popular EpiPen for treating anaphylactic shock.
https://www.fiercepharma.com/manufacturing/pfizer-scrambles-to-fill-void-after-teva-stops-making-chemo-drug-often-children
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