Following on from last week’s conversation, I left off with the issues surrounding the off-label prescriptive habits by physicians and the implicit role of the sponsors. The Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy (AMCP) supports off-label use of FDA-approved drugs when medically appropriate and necessary, but opposes government-mandated coverage of specific pharmaceuticals, whether for FDA-approved or off-label uses.
Mentioned last week was the original definition of off-label use as the use of a drug for clinical indications other than those stated in the labelling approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other regulators. An example would be the use of a drug for oncological treatment (e.g. pancreatic), where the drug would originally have been approved for treating other maladies of the same class (e.g. ovarian, bladder and genitourinary cancer).
Today, and in the coming weeks I shall review the increasingly complex phenomenon in the pharmaceutical industry called off-label drug use. 
