Orphan drugs approved in Canada: availability and additional therapeutic value

Orphan drugs approved in Canada: availability and additional therapeutic valuein their recent article in expert opinion on rare drugs, which is no longer accepting submissions, on the accessibility of orphan drugs in Canada, rawson and Adams conclude that "Canadians with rare disorders continue to suffer from a lack of timely and equitable access to innovative treatments" [1].they based this conclusion on an analysis of the percent of orphan drugs approved by either the Food and drug Administration (FdA) or the european Medicines Agency (eMA) from 2015 to 2020 that were submitted to health Canada, the time taken for these drugs to be evaluated by both the Canadian Agency for drugs and technologies in health (CAdth) and the pan-Canadian Pharmaceutical Alliance, the recommendations from these two agencies and finally how many of the drugs were eventually listed on provincial formularies.this letter to the editor examines the biases in what data rawson and Adams left out and their interpretation of their data.