1 Boring Old Man

E-mails suggest Pfizer tried to suppress study on drug
Suits say company misled on Neurontin

^{Top drug company marketing executives suppressed a large European study suggesting their blockbuster medication Neurontin was ineffective for chronic nerve pain, and they privately strategized about how to silence a British researcher who wanted to go public with the data, according to newly filed documents and e-mails that are part of a Boston court case.}

^{During the same period of several years, Pfizer Inc. launched an advertising blitz promoting the purportedly positive findings of a smaller Neurontin study it had published in a major medical journal – including showing a video to airline passengers before their in-flight movie. The widespread promotion of Neurontin turned what had been a relatively minor epilepsy drug into one of the fastest-growing blockbuster drugs in the world, one that generated more than $2 billion a year in US sales for Pfizer before a generic competitor entered the market in 2004.}

^{Taken together, the e-mails and other internal Pfizer documents produced as part of a potential class action lawsuit against the company represent one of the most detailed looks yet at how a drugmaker controls what physicians and consumers know about a drug. 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"…}

^{A dozen researchers and physicians reviewed thousands of documents for the plaintiffs’ attorneys; their conclusions included that Pfizer controlled the information available to doctors and consumers by suppressing or delaying negative studies about Neurontin’s effectiveness for certain types of pain, migraine headaches, and bipolar illness, and by manipulating other studies before they were published to make the results look more positive.}

^{"They created the illusion of Neurontin’s efficacy in the scientific literature," said lead plaintiff attorney Thomas Greene of Boston. "Pfizer’s scientific misconduct and unethical behavior caused physicians to write tens of millions of ineffective prescriptions for serious and debilitating conditions resulting in billions of dollars in profit for Pfizer at the expense of patients and insurance companies"…}