USA's RADAR tracking "beats FDA by six years"

A network of US physicians claims to identify serious drug reactions "six years earlier than the Food and Drug Administration and drug companies." The Northwest University, Chicago, Illinois, is home to the Research on Adverse Drug Events and Reports (RADAR) at the Feinberg School of Medicine, which provides a focus point for doctors to rapidly report possible drug side effects.

Charles Bennett, the program's director, is also the AC Buehler Professor of Economics and Aging at Northwestern. In a report published in the Archives on Internal Medicine, Prof Bennett claims that RADAR identifies reactions quicker than either the alert systems of the FDA or those of drugmakers (see page 14). The FDA, meanwhile, is under pressure for what critics describe as "passive and inefficient methods of learning about these problems." However, the report also found that drug manufacturers were quicker than RADAR at distributing the data, as the latter relies on publishing studies in peer-reviewed medical journals.

Prof Bennett believes that a formal collaboration between the RADAR and either the FDA or pharmaceutical firms would make sense. He said: "the old way of doing business was a large number of incomplete reports that took an average of seven years to find adverse reactions to drugs. We propose with our system we can cut that to between one to two years."