As it takes Lartru­vo off the shelves, Lil­ly is set­ting up pro­gram to pro­vide drug ac­cess to cur­rent pa­tients

When Lil­ly’s ap­proved soft tis­sue sar­co­ma drug Lartru­vo un­ex­pect­ed­ly failed to help pa­tients live longer in a late-stage study in Jan­u­ary, US and EU reg­u­la­tors dis­cour­aged new pa­tients from start­ing treat­ment with the med­i­cine, and the drug­mak­er sus­pend­ed its pro­mo­tion of the ther­a­py.

Lartru­vo was cleared for use by the FDA un­der the ac­cel­er­at­ed ap­proval path­way — an in­creas­ing­ly pop­u­lar mech­a­nism used by the agency to has­ten the pace of ap­provals —  in 2016, and the con­fir­ma­to­ry Phase III tri­al was in­tend­ed to con­firm the drug’s ben­e­fit. Since the tri­al was un­suc­cess­ful, Lil­ly was ex­pect­ed to re­scind the drug from the mar­ket.  On Thurs­day, the com­pa­ny $LLY said it was work­ing on set­ting up a pro­gram so cur­rent pa­tients can still ac­cess Lartru­vo with “lim­it­ed in­ter­rup­tion” af­ter it is of­fi­cial­ly with­drawn.

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