Trump Picks Bush Alum With Deep Ties To Pharma, Wall Street As FDA Nominee
Scott Gottlieb, a physician who left the FDA in 2007, is a consultant to GlaxoSmithKline’s product investment board; a managing director at T.R. Winston & Company merchant bank, which specializes in health care; and a clinical assistant professor at New York University School of Medicine.
The Washington Post:
Trump To Select Scott Gottlieb, A Physician With Deep Drug-Industry Ties, To Run The FDA
President Trump announced late Friday that he will nominate Scott Gottlieb, a conservative physician and businessman with deep ties to the pharmaceutical industry, to be commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. If confirmed, Gottlieb would bring a strong pro-industry, deregulatory approach to an agency that Trump has criticized as being overly restrictive. But he is also likely to support one of the agency's basic functions: to ensure that drugs are proven safe and effective before they are sold. (McGinley and Johnson, 3/10)
Stat:
Five Things We Know About Scott Gottlieb, Trump's Pick For FDA
Gottlieb hasn’t advocated radical, baby-with-bathwater reforms, but he has proposed a tweak that would shake things up. As it stands, FDA drug reviewers are tasked with both vetting clinical data and making final decisions on applications. Because of that, Gottlieb wrote in 2012 in National Affairs, “reviewers feel an enormous weight of responsibility,” subject to “simultaneous and countervailing pressures to both speed up approval and prevent misuse of new drugs.” (Garde and Scott, 3/10)