Assembly votes to let terminally ill patients try experimental drugs

By Kyle Roerink

Thursday, April 16, 2015 | 3:20 p.m.

Lawmakers in the Nevada Assembly unanimously passed a bipartisan bill that would allow terminally ill patients to try experimental drugs as a last-resort treatment.

Nevada would become the 15th state to implement a “right-to-try” law. A similar measure was passed into law this morning in North Dakota. Others sit on the desks of Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner and Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin.

The Nevada bill now heads to the Senate for vetting and has advocates touting it as a patients’ rights law.

The bill, AB 164, would allow patients with a life expectancy of a year or less to access experimental drugs.

It offers doctors the ability to administer experimental drugs if three conditions are met: the patient is terminal; the patient consents to the treatment; and doctors deem inadequate any existing treatment approved by the Federal Drug Administration.

The legislation exempts doctors and drug manufacturers from liability.

Terminally ill patients would be able to access medications that have passed the first of the FDA’s three testing phases, which determines the toxicity of a drug.

A three-phase trial can take up to 15 years before a drug comes to the marketplace, according to lawmakers who worked on the bill.

The FDA has an exemption that allows patients to access nonapproved drugs. But it’s time consuming, requiring doctors and officials to fill out more than 100 hours of paperwork.

That long wait has helped spur right-to-try policies in legislatures across the country.

As of March, 20 states and Washington, D.C., have examined or will examine right-to-try reforms.

“The effect of right to try has let the FDA know that people at the state level want a better option for terminally ill patients,” said Craig Handzlik, state policy coordinator at the Goldwater Institute, a libertarian think tank in Arizona.

Last year, the FDA approved 1,000 cases. There are at least 650,000 terminally ill cancer patients nationwide, Handzlik said. The FDA is reviewing its current policy on exemptions.

“I see the bill as a state and patients’ rights law to cut red tape and open other avenues currently unavailable to patients,” said James Ohrenschall, D-Las Vegas, and bill cosponsor. There was a similar bill earlier in the session to allow patients with a life expectancy of three years or less to access experimental drugs.

Ohrenschall said his law was “written conservatively so people aren’t taken advantage of by snake oil salesmen.”

Assemblywoman Michele Fiore, R-Las Vegas, co-sponsored the bill and said there are patients and doctors who want the law to pass.

“When a patient is faced with a terminal condition, we need to make every possible treatment available that can help save their life,” she said.