Post-Marketing Drug Withdrawals: A Review

The emergence of new diseases demands high-speed drug development. Drug development is a long and tedious process. As research for medicine goes on several changes occur in the process of drug development. In order to promote safe and proper use of drugs with the fewest side effects, black box warnings are given to the drugs. Many times, these drugs must be removed at the final stage of marketing owing to the many adverse effects found during drug development. Hence, it is important for every newly developed drug to be safe for people and ideally to have no side effects. This review describes the black box warnings issued by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for certain drugs and the reasons for some of the post-marketing drug withdrawals. Most of the post-marketing drug withdrawals are a result of unanticipated or unprecedented adverse drug effects.