Four New Drugs are Around the Corner. Here’s What You Need to Know.

The Food and Drug Administration approved 59 new drugs last year, a record for the agency which over the years has swung back and forth between tight control and leniency. We are in the midst of perhaps the agency’s most permissive era ever, thanks to its openness to speed up reviews and to greenlight certain drugs with slim evidence, like those for cancer patients who have run through all other options, or for kids with rare diseases and no available treatments.