Pharma is forging ahead with research and development for new medications, but physicians may not be ready, The Wall Street Journal reported April 5.
The future is happening now with gene therapies — which are engineered to modify a person's genes, and are often priced in the millions but involve a one-time treatment — and some experts worry the science will go to waste if physicians don't know how to administer them.
"The bottleneck used to be the science and finding drugs," Allyson Berent-Weisse, DVM, chief scientific officer of the Foundation for Angelman Syndrome Therapeutics, told the Journal. "The new bottleneck is having enough people trained to give them."
Complicated drug processes include cold chain management of one CAR-T cancer drug, which needs storage at negative 238 degrees and a careful thawing in a "water bath"; lumbar punctures, or inserting a needle between two vertebrae; and a gene therapy for retinal disease that is injected into the back of each eye, according to the Journal.
At Chicago-based Rush University, pediatric neurologist Elizabeth Berry-Kravis, MD, PhD, will lead a training program for physicians to learn new drug administration techniques.
"Doctors are trained to see patients in the clinic. They are not trained in [...] how to deliver drugs through intrathecal procedures," Dr. Berry-Kravis, co-director of Rush's molecular diagnostics section of the genetic laboratory, told the Journal. "We will train them. The doctors will get those skills. They will be ready to go out and mimic what we are doing."
Read more here.