Race row brewing as ‘black-only’ heart drug seeks licence
Regulators in the US are being asked to approve a heart failure treatment for black people only.
The application has already sharply divided those who see the move as a big step forward, and others who think race has no place in medicine.
Next week a panel of US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) experts will decide whether to recommend granting the licence.
The likelihood is that the agency will approve the therapy in some form, New Scientist magazine reported.
The drug, BiDil, is said to work much better in African-Americans than in whites. Its makers, the Boston biotech company NitroMed, claims this is due to biological differences between the two groups.
African-Americans have lower levels of nitric oxide in their blood vessels and are more prone to high blood pressure.
Critics point to the fact that black Americans are generally less healthy anyway because of poverty and poor access to health care.
Nonetheless, trials found that BiDil improved survival by 47% in black patients but only by 15% in whites.
A study of 1,050 people who identified themselves as African Americans showed that treating heart failure with BiDil combined with standard therapies reduced annual death rate by 43%.
NitroMed’s chief medical officer and cardiologist Manuel Worcel told New Scientist: “Heart failure is a catastrophe. So, when you have a drug that saves around half of patients, this is huge progress.”
Opponents argue that NitroMed is simply trying to find a market niche.
Jonathan Kahn, of Hamline University in St Paul, Minnesota, an expert in medical ethics, said: “Some people talk about heart failure as a different disease in blacks in what I can only describe as an irresponsible manner. It fuels talk about how races are genetically different. This is very unfortunate and dangerous.”
Yet doctors have long known that certain diseases are more common in some populations than others.
The blood condition sickle-cell anaemia is most common in people from Africa, the Caribbean, the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East and Asia. Cystic fibrosis is more common in whites than in blacks, and prostate cancer in people of African descent.
