FDA's critical path initiative: a perspective on contributions of biostatistics.

This article describes the motivation for, description of, and the objectives and plans for the FDA's initiative that was introduced in March of 2004 by way of a report titled 'Innovation or Stagnation?--Challenge and Opportunity on the Critical Path to New Medical Products'. The FDA initiative is very much an outreach effort and a wake-up call to many constituencies to contribute and partner to improve the product development process and thereby to contribute to the success rate of new products that will benefit the public. We discuss in general terms where some of the opportunities and challenges exist for the discipline of biostatistics to make contributions to this effort over the next few years. In particular, guidance development in five areas is considered as is the need to devote new energy and efforts to quantitative risk assessment and safety evaluation, an area that has lagged the attention received in the efficacy evaluation area.