The ideal versus the best

摘要

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. That is the philosophy behind America's Paediatric Exclusivity Programme. Youngsters often metabolise medicines in a different way from adults and sometimes experience unpredictable side-effects, but the children's drug market is not always big enough in its own right for firms to bother with trials needed to find out the details of such differences. The bribe that the ten-year-old programme offers in order to shift that balance is a six-month patent extension on any product tested in appropriate child-focused trials.