Pharmacontrol

Pharmaceutical companies seem to be in the YWA energy field lately.

Here's another article that comes in my email today from a PR Watch list service which discusses what I was saying about corporations owning the research they pay for and publishing only what serves their interests, no matter what the resultant public concerns might be:

A Canadian haematologist at the centre of a cause célèbre over academic freedom and research funded by a drug company vowed this week to continue her crusade after failing in her attempt to challenge the European marketing authorisation granted for the thalassaemia drug deferiprone.

...Dr [Nancy] Olivieri, a specialist in thalassaemia, had been conducting trials on the drug in young patients when she broke a confidentiality agreement with Apotex, the Toronto based pharmaceutical company that owns the commercial rights to the drug. She went public with her belief that it was insufficiently effective and could cause liver damage in some patients.

In 1999 she launched proceedings to try to get the European marketing halted, but last month the court ruled she had no standing to challenge it and rejected her claim as inadmissible.

..."This ruling guarantees that only a drug company attempting to sell a drug will control the content of the scientific data submitted or not submitted to the European CPMP," she said. "It no longer matters whether drug companies tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, because it's unchallengeable now."

Apotex removed her from the trials, and she was sacked from her job at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, an appointment she held jointly with her academic post at the university. She was eventually reinstated at the hospital, but with a five year leave of absence.

Neither the hospital nor the university backed her in the dispute, but in 2001 a report into the affair, commissioned by the Canadian Association of University Teachers, concluded that her academic freedom was violated when the company stopped the trials and threatened legal action if she made her concerns public.  full article