OTTAWA—Some drugs fast-tracked through the regulatory approval process for life-threatening illnesses such as breast cancer and multiple sclerosis are still being sold under conditional licenses, with the government keeping any progress toward meeting requirements secret.

Health Canada introduced a policy a dozen years ago that allows drug manufacturers to start selling some medications that show promising early results in treating dangerous or debilitating diseases before all the usual conditions for licensing are met.

Called the Notice of Compliance with conditions policy (NOC/c), the idea is to get promising new drugs through the red tape and into the hands — or bloodstreams — of patients as soon as possible.

Follow-up studies or other requirements to establish the efficacy of the medication must then be completed and submitted to Health Canada within an agreed time frame before the new drug, or new use of a drug to treat a particular disease, can obtain full regulatory approval.

A federal government database available online shows that of the 95 new drugs (including generics) or indications that Health Canada has approved since the NOC/c policy came into effect, 63 are still being sold under the conditional license.

Four conditional licenses have been either suspended or revoked and the remaining 28 have fulfilled their conditions between six months and more than seven years after they were granted.

But unless conditions are met or the conditional license is suspended there is no way for patients or physicians to find out how close — or how far — a pharmaceutical company is to meeting the requirements Health Canada demanded.

“There is no information publicly available as to why the conditions haven’t been fulfilled,” Dr. Joel Lexchin, a professor in the School of Health Policy and Management at York University, said in an interview last week.

One example is the drug bevacizumab, better known by its brand name Avastin, which Health Canada approved to treat advanced breast cancer last year on the condition that manufacturer Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. complete two additional double blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials.

Health Canada does not make the status of those studies available and Hoffman-La Roche spokeswoman Farah Meghji said only that the company had submitted new information to support lifting the conditional approval.

Lexchin said he is concerned the problem will continue once Health Canada moves to a progressive licensing scheme, as it put forward in proposed amendments to the Food and Drug Act in a 2008 bill that died with the last federal election and has yet to be reintroduced.

Progressive licensing would allow Health Canada to better monitor drugs once they reach the market — an area where the federal regulator is currently weak — but it could mean the same secrecy seen under NOC/c.

“Health Canada may or may not be vigorous in enforcing the requirement to do additional studies and it may not release the progress on these post-marketing studies to the public,” Lexchin said.

Dr. Supriya Sharma, director general of the health products and food branch at Health Canada, acknowledged the information is kept secret and suggested that could change if patients, physicians and the public demand it.

“I think in terms of providing information and openness and transparency it’s a continuing process, so anything that would be suggested that would help improve that, we certainly would take that into consideration,” Sharma said in an interview last week.

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Sharma stressed that very few drugs are approved under the NOC/c policy and that they must meet the same quality and safety standards as any other drug before they even get that far, but the policy was created to fill an important need.

“We also have to balance when patients have access to it, because delaying access to something that could potentially be a benefit also has risks associated with it,” Sharma said.