Let's play "Is it Ironic?" Posted by schnro at 01/06/06 02:22 PM

It's a black fly in your Chardonnay, It's a death row pardon two minutes too late, And isn't it ironic...dontcha think

Alanis Morissette, "Ironic"

It seems to me that a fly in your wine isn't ironic so much as disgusting. But a recent lawsuit by Proctor & Gamble may qualify as irony.

Last week Procter & Gamble and Sanofi-Aventis announced a lawsuit against their competitors, the makers of Boniva, alleging they falsely claimed in ads that Boniva had been proven to reduce nonspinal fractures.

P&G was just taken to task in an expose in Slate. The author, Jennifer Washburn, walks through how supposedly independent research on the osteoporosis drug, Actonel, may have been compromised by interference by Procter & Gamble. The story is a good -- or bad -- example of how drug company money can taint ostensibly objective academic research.

A little background: several drugs are available to treat postmenopausal osteoporosis. Fosamax (Merck) is the most popular, with about 2/3 of the market. A P&G lawsuit concerns the next most popular drug, Actonel (P&G and Sanofi-Aventis), which has about 1/3 of the market and a distant competitor, Boniva (GlaxoSmithKline and Roche), which represents less than 2% of the market.

The Slate article accuses P&G of manipulating data to make it's drug, Actonel, look better than the leading drug, Fosamax by Merck.

According to the story in Slate:

. . . research asserting P&G's claims about the effectiveness of Actonel appeared in June in the prestigious Journal of Bone and Mineral Research. Eastell and his co-investigators stated that "all authors had full access to the data and analyses."

Another researcher on the project, Blumsohn:

. . . warned Eastell they could both be accused of scientific fraud if they kept authoring papers without seeing the underlying data. A few days later, P&G's Barton sent an e-mail reiterating that Blumsohn could not perform his own independent analysis of his data but could come to P&G's offices to look at it.

When Blumsohn did review the data, he noticed 40 percent of the patient data was missing. In response P&G officials:

expressed concern that if P&G included the missing 40 percent of the data, Merck would exploit the results. "Because that is contradicting our original manuscript"

The documents underlying the story, in the words of Vera Hassner Sharav of the Alliance for Human Research Protection:

demonstrate that when academic research institutions enter into partnerships with pharmaceutical companies, they compromise their integrity and the integrity of academic scientists who can no longer trust either their academic colleagues or the institution to act in good faith to protect the integrity of Science.

"A black fly in your Chardonnay?" Not ironic, gross.
"A death row pardon two minutes too late?" Not ironic, tragic.
P&G suing its rival for misleading advertising after just being busted for possibly manipulating research? Ironic.

comments (1)

1 Posted by citizenactivist at 01/17/06 05:05 PM

It seems that corporate lawyers have entirely too much time on their hands. It sounds like P&G gets to both hammer away on their competion AND say hey "everybody does it."