New Zyprexa Documents Show Lilly Ghostwrote Zyprexa Studies
A new batch of Zyprexa documents was unsealed in US District Court in New York last month, something that escaped my notice due to all the Seroquel documents being released elsewhere. Bloomberg got the documents–which I’ll attempt to obtain myself–and yesterday had a wire story on Lilly openly ghostwrote articles for allegedly independent researchers and then shepherded their publication, a true manipulation of the academic publishing process. Apparently, this goes on a fair amount in pharma circles, leading one expert to tell Bloomberg that such ghostwriting has created “a huge body of medical literature that society can’t trust.”
Do ya think? What’s interesting is that the FDA has no regulations to address this sort of thing.
“Ensuring that medical journal articles presented Zyprexa study results in a positive light was one way for Lilly to reach its sales goal, company officials said in its plan, according to the documents.
“To do that, Lilly officials hired ghostwriters to prepare submissions to journals such as Progress in Neurology and Psychiatry, according to the unsealed documents.
“‘The paper for the Progress in Neurology and Psychiatry supplement has been completed and sent to the journal for peer review,’ Kerrie Mitchell, an employee of the public relations agency Cohn & Wolfe, wrote in a Feb. 23, 2001, e-mail to Michael Sale, a Lilly marketing official. The message was among the unsealed files.
“‘We “ghost” wrote this article and then worked with author Dr. Haddad to work up the final copy,’ Mitchell said in the e-mail. Eric Litchfield, a spokesman for Cohn & Wolfe, didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment.
“Peter Haddad, a researcher at Greater Manchester West Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust in the U.K., was listed as the article’s lead author. Haddad didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“The global Lilly team approved a draft of Haddad’s ghost- written paper in 2000, according to the unsealed documents. Lilly’s U.K. team had to give final approval to the article because Progress in Neurology and Psychiatry was based there, Mitchell said in the February 2001 e-mail.”
This sounds like the Lilly we know and love, as in this February 2007 piece of mine on how Lilly discussed how to spin glucose increases associated with Zyprexa in a study. As usual, Lilly claims nothing is amiss here:
“‘Plaintiffs are releasing one-sided, cherry-picked documents obtained in discovery to selected news media in an effort to try their cases’ there, said Lilly spokeswoman Marni Lemons. ‘Lilly remains prepared to defend ourselves against all of these allegations in the appropriate venue, a court of law.’”
To date, Lilly has not let a single Zyprexa lawsuit go to trial and has settled $2.7 billion worth of cases with perhaps s much as another $6 billion to $8 billion to go. Methinks, it won’t take any of those cases to trial.
My hunch is that most of the revelations from Lilly corporate documents were already made in the earlier batch of leaked documents made public on this site in February 2007, but that there still may be some interesting bits out there.
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