Regulators adopt more orphan drugs

摘要

Like a cancer cell, the definition of lymphoma has been dividing. Nearly 700,000 people in the United States have the disease, but over the past few decades, lymphoma has been sliced into several dozen subgroups on the basis of the type of immune cell that becomes cancerous. Drug companies have targeted these subtypes and have asked that they be counted as orphan diseases' - in the United States, this refers to diseases that have no cure and that affect fewer than 200,000 people, according to the definition given by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).