William C. Clark Quotes

It's O.K. if you've got a smartphone app or a social network, and you go live with it before it's ready; people aren't going to die. But with medicine, it's different.

We all want our drugs to be safe - and so an essential part of the pathway to the development of a new drug is approval by a regulator.

On the third stage is used for medicine, it is not known to the public.

Over the years, HIV/AIDS activists and their allies have been pioneers in creating new frontiers in the medical establishment. Through their efforts, the FDA drug approval procedures were reformed so promising new therapies could reach desperate patients quicker.

Would-be drug companies must either produce medicines that stand up to federal scrutiny, demonstrate that their data has value to other companies, or go out of business.

If you go to the FDA with a drug that's only meant to treat 50 people, and it's a 95 percent cure rate, you'll get your drug approved.

And there are lots of drug companies that are working on cure or medicine.

The United States has an active pharmaceutical industry that has brought huge benefits to the U.S. public. Most Americans, who benefit from these advances, have little understanding of how difficult it is to create an important new medical therapy and make it available to improve public health.

Proprietary medicine certainly has to be held in check.

When you work in the pharmaceutical industry you realize that there's a lot out of people's control, and there's ways that people can be helped.

The problem we are trying to solve is that of drugs that would have never seen the light of day for reasons that have nothing to do with the inherent properties of drug candidates themselves and more to do with bureaucratic institutions within which they often sit.

I agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.

I keep encouraging the pharmaceutical companies to put more money into R&D.

The reality is that zero defects in products plus zero pollution plus zero risk on the job is equivalent to maximum growth of government plus zero economic growth plus runaway inflation.

If you sit in a position where decisions that you take would have a serious effect on people, you can't ignore a lot of experience around the world which says this drug has these negative effects.

When the FDA forces an old drug off the market, patients have very little say in the matter. Patients have even less of a say when the FDA chooses not to approve a new drug. Instead, we are supposed to rely on the FDA's judgment and be grateful. But can the FDA really make a choice that is appropriate for everyone? Of course not.

Though the principles of the banking trade may appear somewhat abstruse, the practice is capable of being reduced to strict rules. To depart upon any occasion from these rules, in consequence of some flattering speculation of extraordinary gain, is almost always extremely dangerous, and frequently fatal to the banking company which attempts it.

There are so few drugs for these killer diseases, but for erectile dysfunction, we have had 14 drugs since 1996… It says something about where the priorities of the pharmaceutical companies seem to lie.

It’s our tax dollars that fund the initial research for these molecules that get transferred to corporations. We have an investment here… We end up paying for our drugs twice. We pay for the initial development through our tax dollars. And then when it goes on the market we pay their inflated prices.

We do not think it necessary to prove that a quack medicine is poison. Let the vendor prove it to be sanitive.

We could conquer cancer if we really wanted to.

The FDA serves a real purpose: To protect public health.

We should look for ways to expedite generic drug approvals, particularly for products that have a long history of being safe and effective.

Once an effective drug is approved to treat a deadly condition, introducing a second drug to treat the same disease can be hard. It's tough to recruit patients with a debilitating disease for a clinical trial when a proven medicine is already available.

Regulators at the Food and Drug Administration have a tough job.