The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America last week submitted an amicus brief relating to the FDA’s response to a drug company’s suit challenging limits on truthful communications about off-label uses of a drug. See Amarin Pharma, Inc. v. FDA,  No. 15-cv-03588 (S.D.N.Y)(amicus brief filed 6/11/15).

Readers will recall that the case involves FDA interpretations that potentially make a drug manufacturer criminally and civilly liable for providing truthful and non-misleading scientific and medical information to well-trained health care professionals regarding unapproved uses of FDA-approved drugs or data that are not contained in the FDA approved labeling for such medicines. (Our friends over at the Drug and Device Law Blog have covered this issue extensively.)

PhRMA said in the amicus brief filed June 11th in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that FDA’s recent maneuver — a regulatory letter to the plaintiff, Amarin Pharma  –did not “cure the constitutional defects in FDA’s content-based restrictions on protected speech.” In the letter, the FDA said it now all of a sudden doesn’t object to many of the “off-label statements” the company might consider making about its cholesterol treatment drug.  So, the agency wouldn’t necessarily consider the dissemination of some of that information to be false or misleading.

Because doctors routinely lawfully prescribe FDA-approved drugs for unapproved uses, informed patient care relies upon doctors having access to accurate, comprehensive, and current information about such uses. Biopharmaceutical manufacturers are an important source of this knowledge, said the brief. Amarin has a First Amendment right to provide such truthful and non-misleading  information. Doctors have a First Amendment right to receive it. And patients have a strong health-related interest in an affirmation of those rights.

FDA’s recent made-for-litigation “regulatory letter” to Amarin does not cure the constitutional defects in FDA’s content-based restrictions on protected speech. The brief argued that instead FDA exacerbates and reinforces them in a footnote which reiterates in broad strokes the Agency’s
longstanding position that the FDCA and FDA’s implementing regulations prohibit manufacturers from speaking to healthcare professionals about unapproved uses. Beyond that, the letter purports to be an exercise of enforcement discretion, relies on “draft” guidance documents that FDA itself contends do not bind the Agency, and contains significant caveats that preserve the Government’s option to pursue criminal and civil enforcement based on manufacturers’ protected speech.

For example, “under these circumstances,” FDA stated in the letter, it does not intend to object to the proposed communications “if made in the manner and to the extent described below.” FDA thus seeks to create a one-off discretionary exception, applicable to this case and nowhere else — precisely the type of case-by-case determination regarding the legality of speech that the First Amendment forbids. Moreover, the letter relies exclusively on guidance documents that FDA itself contends are non-binding. Even if they would be deemed binding, many of the guidance documents cited in FDA’s letter remain in “draft” form.  PhRMA and others have submitted comments to FDA objecting to many aspects of these draft guidance documents, because, among other things, they continue to censor and burden protected speech based on both its content and the identity of the speaker.

The brief points out that FDA’s letter is not the first instance of a discretionary modification of ostensibly nonbinding guidance infringing on First Amendment rights. When manufacturers have
challenged FDA’s approach to speech about unapproved uses in Court, FDA has previously made ad hoc statements backing off of certain of those policies as a matter of enforcement discretion and with carefully vague caveats. FDA should not be permitted, argued the amicus, to avoid judicial scrutiny of its published regulations restricting protected speech on the basis of such non-final and potentially nonbinding “guidance” and such revocable assertions of enforcement discretion.

Certainly one to watch.