so if something was useful for 100 ailments, it needs 100 different approvals, and a company willing to attempt doing that
what more likely happens is one treatment is denied for the one ailment the company thought they were tackling, and that one treatment is never pursued again
so there's a lot of waste in this particular approach to protecting the public. I'm not familiar with other approaches.
Doctors already have discretion to prescribe Tagrisso for the common flu. However, a doctor that does so will struggle to get insurance to cover it, and will have a harder defense if the patient sues.
I was under the impression that patients having to "wait" for approvals would be missing out. But in theory you could get a lot of experimental treatments if you're willing to take the risk?
The bottle neck is you need someone with a better use hypothesis, and a billion dollars to test that. Drug Trials and development are obscenely expensive.
Even if this was the most altruistic, non-profit funded goal to solve an obscure ailment, once that inevitably fails - and statistically it is inevitably - all capital has been expended, your team's reputation has been spent. You go to something that has more consensus instead of your alchemy concoction nobody's ever head of and wasn't good for the one thing you made it for.