AstraZeneca “buried” unfavorable studies of its $4.4 billion blockbuster psychiatric drug Seroquel, according to internal documents released Friday in a legal dispute between the company and lawyers for thousands of people who sued the company because they said the drug caused diabetes and weight gain.
"They not only failed to warn about the risk of diabetes, but they marketed it as not having that risk," said Houston attorney Ed Blizzard, one of the lead attorneys representing roughly 15,000 plaintiffs suing the British drugmaker, whose U.S. operations are based in Delaware.
In one of the documents, a 1997 e-mail message, Richard Lawrence, an AstraZeneca official, praised Lisa Arvenitis, the company’s Seroquel project physician at the time, for minimizing adverse findings in a “cursed” study. He wrote: “Lisa has done a great ‘smoke-and-mirrors job!’ ”
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