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Drug companies withheld results of anti-depressant studies

Posted Jan 17th 2008 7:15AM by Zack Miller (RSS feed)
Filed under: Bad News, Pfizer (PFE), Scandals, Lilly (Eli) (LLY)

There is an unbelievable story in The New York Times today about the pharmaceutical industry. It appears that the companies marketing drugs like Prozac and Paxil have been lax in reporting results of studies of their anti-depressant drugs.

NYTimes.com is reporting that one-third of all studies conducted by firms such as Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY), Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) and Wyeth (NYSE: WYE) go unpublished.

Citing a new report in the New England Journal of Medicine, the article reports that "about 60 percent of people taking the drugs report significant relief from depression, compared with roughly 40 percent of those on placebo pills. But when the less positive, unpublished trials are included, the advantage shrinks: the drugs outperform placebos, but by a modest margin."

There is a great quote about the impact of this new study written by Dr. Jeffrey M. Drazen, the editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine:

This is a very important study for two reasons. One is that when you prescribe drugs, you want to make sure you're working with best data possible; you wouldn't buy a stock if you only knew a third of the truth about it.

Considering that Pfizer is now making $1.7 billion off a drug treating a condition that the medical field is not in agreement as to whether it exists or not, buyers beware of nebulous information.

Update: Just reading this story on the FT about the EU raiding the offices of global pharma companies suspected of colluding on price fixing.

Zack Miller is the Managing Editor of IsraelNewsletter.com and a former equity analyst for a leading multinational hedge fund. Author does not own stocks mentioned above.