The lawsuit-generating spinal treatment Infuse was approved by the FDA in 2002, and, according to a disturbing investigative report by the Milwaukee Sentinel and MedPage Today, the feds gave it the nod even though concerns about its safety were raised and it had been tested on so few patients as to make conclusions about its usefulness meaningless.
The problems caused by the spinal implant, which is supposed to encourage bone growth and fuse the gaps between vertebrae after fusion surgery, resulted in Medtronic, its manufacturer, recently agreeing to pay $22 million to settle about 950 lawsuits, and reserving another $140 million to settle an anticipated 3,800 additional claims.
“It appears the clinical trials, unfortunately, were not designed to adequately test for safety of the product,” said one Sentinel/MedPage source, a chief of spinal surgery at a major metropolitan hospital.
The FDA approved Infuse not as a life-saving drug or an intervention that reduces disability significantly; it was approved as an alternative to traditional spinal fusion surgery.
As the story notes, testing new biologic agents usually requires clinical trials involving 1,000 to 3,000 people. But because the FDA invited Infuse on the market as a combination device, not a biologic agent, its trial involved a paltry 277 subjects. Medtronic’s website refers to Infuse as “biologic device.”
Biologic drugs, as the Sentinel/MedPage story explains, also are known as bio-pharmaceuticals. “They replicate natural substances in the body such as hormones, antibodies, or, in the case of Infuse, growing bone. Traditional drugs are made by combining chemicals. But biologics are manufactured in a living microorganism, such as plant or animal cells, and can pose special safety risks such as infections, immune system disorders and cancers.” One study found that about 1 in 4 of 174 biologic drugs had been the subject of safety-related regulatory actions after they got on the market.
Because Infuse was approved in a “noninferiority” trial, Medtronic did not have to prove it was any better than the traditional treatment.
“It should not have gone through the device approval process,” a health researcher in orthopedic surgery told the Sentinel/MedPage “It should have gone through the biological testing process.”
The story’s revelations won’t surprise readers of this blog (see our post, “Medtronic Spinal Treatment Is Riskier and No Better than Bone Graft “); it showed that more than 6,500 reports of Infuse-related problems have been registered with the FDA’s medical device reporting system since Infuse was approved.
The complications include cancer, sterility and pain.
Adding another “ick” layer to the approval of a product that harms people, according to the Sentinel/MedPage, is the group of spine surgeons who received millions of dollars in royalties from Medtronic and who had co-authored papers failing to acknowledge the link between Infuse and several serious complications. In some cases, the medical journals publishing the papers didn’t fully disclose Medtronic’s financial relationship with the authors.
Can you say “conflict of interest”?
So questionable was this product even among orthopedists that The Spine Journal, according to the Sentinel/MedPage, dedicated a whole issue to its deficiencies. It referred to research that found that Infuse had complication rates 10 to 50 times greater than the complication rates estimated in the papers written by the doctors whose priority wasn’t helping patients get well, but helping their own bottom lines.
The FDA, for its part, issued the usual “what, me?” response to Sentinel/MedPage inquiries. An email from its spokeswoman said Infuse was approved based on clinical and nonclinical data that “demonstrated a reasonable assurance of safety and effectiveness,” and that an advisory panel of outside experts reviewed the evidence and voted unanimously to recommend approval.
She said the FDA has reviewed the thousands of adverse events reports about Infuse, post-approval studies and medical literature, and continues to believe there is a reasonable assurance of safety.