Montana is well known for luring visitors with outdoor activities such as fly fishing and hiking. Now, longevity companies are exploring investments in the state in a moonshot bid to make it a medical tourism hub.
State legislators have backed measures designed to ease patients’ access to therapies not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The measures, known as “Right to Try” laws, exist in more than 40 states.
But Montana has pushed even further by adopting rules to make it easier for businesses to provide experimental drugs, therapies or devices and profit from selling them.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pledged to increase access to alternative medicine and recently shared publicly that he traveled to Antigua to receive a non-FDA-approved stem-cell therapy for his voice condition, known as spasmodic dysphonia.
“We’re going to end the war at FDA against alternative medicine,” Kennedy said in an interview released in May with self-described biohacker Gary Brecka. “If you want to take an experimental drug, you ought to be able to do that.”
The laws have drawn the ire of some medical professionals, who fear that hopeful patients will try experimental drugs only to find them ineffective at best and harmful at worst. They also fear the state is on shaky legal ground with federal regulators who have, in recent years, cracked down on businesses offering certain unapproved therapies.
“If we start hearing about harmed patients, it’s highly likely FDA gets involved,” said Lowell Schiller, former acting chief counsel for the FDA in 2018.
Read the full story: Longevity Firms Push Montana to Become Hub for Biohacking, Experimental Treatments (WSJ)