Firms accused over experimental drugs

A US Senate hearing on compassionate use of experimental drugs hasheard that drugmakers have ignored patients' requests for such drugs. However, Samuel Waksal, president of ImClone, testified that while his company had granted compassionate-use supplies of its experimental cancer drug C225 to only 30 patients out of over 10,000 requests, the critical issue had been its ability to produce sufficient supplies, reports Reuters.

To claims from the husband of a recently-deceased cancer patient that three of her letters asking for C225 had been ignored, he acknowledged that ImClone should have communicated more effectively, so that terminally-ill patients could have been spared the stress of waiting for a drug that they could not get because the company was unable to manufacture enough of it. The firm had been "young and inexperienced" at the time of the requests, he said.