Heidi Alexander: “I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a copy of my remarks at the Senate Health, Education, Labor and…”

“I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a copy of my remarks at the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing this week. There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows: Continuing America's Leadership in Medical Innovation for Patients We've got three major objectives in this committee: Fixing No Child Left Behind, Reauthorizing the Higher Education Act, and third--one we're all looking forward to without exception--improving biomedical innovation, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Today is the first hearing Ranking Member Murray and I are holding on our bipartisan initiative to examine how we get drugs, devices and treatments from the discovery process through the regulatory process into our medicine cabinets and doctors' offices. Today discoveries supported by NIH often do not come to FDA's door for six, eight, ten, or even twelve years. And the average cost to get a single drug from the laboratory through the approval process to the medicine cabinet is, according to some estimates, about $1 billion. Other estimates say it's double that or even more. This initiative builds on work the committee has done-- legislation was passed in 1997 and as recently as 2012--to try to get at the same goal of speeding up review and approval of drugs and devices while still ensuring they are safe.…”