Anyone know more about the people named in red?
Pfizer tried to suppress medical studies that reached unfavorable conclusions about the effectiveness of the company's epilepsy drug Neurontin, internal Pfizer documents submitted in a lawsuit against the company showed.
The documents suggest that Pfizer's marketers influenced Neurontin's scientific record to boost sales at least until 2003 by delaying the publication or altering the conclusions of studies that had found no evidence the drug worked for various conditions besides epilepsy.
The documents, including reports by experts who reviewed thousands of company documents for plaintiffs, were submitted to the U.S. District Court in Boston.
In the case of the European study, called 224, the full findings were never published as a stand-alone paper; data from the study were pooled into results from several other Pfizer studies and published in a minor journal in 2003.
"We must delay publication of 224, as its results were not positive," wrote Pfizer marketing executive John Marino in a September 2000 e-mail to Angela Crespo, senior manager of major markets for Neurontin.
Later that month, Michael Rowbotham, Neurontin team leader, e-mailed Crespo about the problem of Dr. John Reckless, an investigator on the study who was pressing Pfizer to publish the results for ethical reasons. Along with delaying publication for as long as possible "it will be more important how WE write up the study," Rowbotham wrote. "We are not allowing him to write it up himself."
More at The Globe
1 comment:
Prescription Access Litigation (PAL), a nonprofit organization that works to end illegal pharmaceutical industry tactics, has posted all the expert reports and documents referred to in this article. They are blog.prescriptionaccess.org/?p=304
Post a Comment