By Eliza Dysart
The law may seem far afield from cancer research, but a number of different legal institutions play a role in the uptake and application of this scientific work.
Lars Noah, a UF Law professor and new member of the UF Health Cancer Institute, has spent 35 years studying the work of various federal regulatory agencies that attend to public health, with a particular focus on the work of the Food and Drug Administration.
“The FDA confronts cancer in any number of settings, first in licensing drugs and devices intended to diagnose, prevent or treat malignancies; second, in managing the risks of carcinogenicity associated with all manner of items subject to its jurisdiction, including drugs and devices labeled for other purposes, as well as food and color additives, cosmetics and tobacco products,” he explained.
Noah was recently named the most impactful food and drug law scholar in the nation in citation-based rankings compiled by HeinOnline. He also ranked #15 on that site’s list of health law scholars.
“Much of my work focuses on the different ways that various legal institutions make use of biomedical research, whether related to cancer, contagion or other health threats,” he said.
Beyond the FDA, Noah has written and taught about other federal agencies that attend to potential carcinogens, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Courts also play a role in this space when resolving private litigation, such as medical malpractice lawsuits that allege negligent failures to diagnose, which often turn on assessing sometimes disputed questions about cancer staging and prognosis. Toxic tort litigation routinely confronts efforts to identify who to hold responsible for causing cancer.
Noah pointed to one notable project that he tackled while still in private practice in the early 1990s as an illustration of the connections between these fields. Before the antihistamine Claritin became a blockbuster drug, the FDA nearly rejected the manufacturer’s application for a license because of a statistically significant increase in liver tumors observed among rodents exposed to high doses of the active ingredient loratadine.
“I managed to persuade agency officials that a simple disclosure of the animal test results in the package insert would suffice,” he said. “When the FDA switched Claritin to nonprescription status one decade later, it dropped even this statement from the labeling given the drug’s extensive record of safe use in humans.”
Noah enjoys opportunities to bridge disciplinary boundaries and hopes to share his distinctive areas of expertise with colleagues on the other side of the sprawling UF campus.
