Whistleblower Twice Over: First Lilly, Now AstraZeneca - Health Blog - WSJ

By Katherine Hobson

It might be tough for James Wetta to get his next pharma job – then again, now that he’s a millionaire, he probably doesn’t need it.

The former AstraZeneca sales rep filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the company in 2004 that was only yesterday made public. Astra is going to pay $520 million to settle a probe into its marketing of the antipsychotic Seroquel (it denies the charges), and Wetta stands to pocket some portion of $45 million for his role in the investigation. He’s sharing the money with another whistleblower.

But the California resident has been down this road before, Dow Jones Newswires reports. He also helped the government in a similar probe of Eli Lilly, his previous employer. Lilly last year paid upwards of $1.4 billion to settle its own antipsychotic marketing issues with the Justice Department. (It, too denied the charges.) Wetta got a piece of the $100 million of that settlement reserved for whistleblowers.

According to his Astra suit, Wetta received negative evaluations at work after refusing to participate in the off-label marketing of Seroquel to child and adolescent psychiatrists, primary-care docs and elderly dementia sufferers. He was eventually let go, he claims. At Lilly, he quit after “objecting to certain sales tactics that he was informed would help him keep his job, including arranging for certain drugs to be switched on patients without their knowledge,” Dow Jones writes.

It’s a fair bet his photo is now hanging in pharma H.R. offices everywhere.

Image: iStockphoto

via blogs.wsj.com

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