The road from conception to useful application for a new drug therapy, when properly navigated, is fully mapped, carefully followed, scientfically rigorous and honestly appraised. Not so with a big study of the lucrative drug Neurontin, according to Yale researchers.
In the case of Neurontin, a drug to treat epilepsy, critical parts of that journey took a few unauthorized detours, according to a report in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine reviewed documents relating to the epilepsy drug gabapentin, a drug patented as Neurontin by Pfizer in 1994, that they concluded were misrepresented by the pharmaceutical company as a clinical trial.
Instead, they said, it was a “seeding trial,” which they described as “An important and expensive form of marketing, … a study of an approved drug or device in which the primary objective may not be to answer an important scientific question but rather to introduce a new product and induce clinicians to use it.”
In other words, seeding trials juice the market by enticing practitioners to sample and prescribe a drug that’s already FDA-approved.
Joseph Ross, M.D., said that Study of Neurotonin: Tritrate to Effect, Profile of Safety (STEPS) “was a seeding trial posing as a legitimate scientific study. The trial itself, not trial results, was part of a marketing strategy used to promote gabapentin and increase prescribing among investigators without informing trial patients or investigators.”
As noted in the Los Angeles Times, the STEPS study also was intended to fend off efforts by a competitor to introduce a rival drug.
The breach wasn’t against the law, but it wasn’t ethical because the purpose was primarily to promote, not to discover, and because trial participants and physicians might be unaware of the studies’ true purpose.
The Yale team said STEPS’ stated purpose was to examine doses of gabapentin within a patient population of 2,759. Two articles about its results were published in scientific journals, but, the team noted, outside sources had questioned the study’s design as uncontrolled (that is, it didn’t include a separate, or “control,” group of participants who didn’t receive the drug). In addition, it was not a blind study. Scientific rigor demands that study participants remain unaware-blind-about whether they are receiving a drug or a placebo (fake drug).
There’s more. The Yale team said, “Data quality during the study was often compromised,” and some documents appeared to suggest that marketing personnel helped to collect data and witnessed the trial, not just the results.
Article first published as Neurontin Research Was So Flawed It Deserved to Be Called Marketing, Not Science on Technorati.