That AstraZeneca and Seroquel have been in hot water lately for various reasons is well known by anybody who follows pharma and psychiatric news. There has been a ton of info to follow and since it’s not the main focus of my blog I’ve only mentioned it once or twice. For thorough background coverage check out Furious Seasons ongoing coverage.
Today The Washington Post chimes in with a strong piece and I quote from it below:
The study would come to be called “cursed,” but it started out just as Study 15.
It was a long-term trial of the antipsychotic drug Seroquel. The common wisdom in psychiatric circles was that newer drugs were far better than older drugs, but Study 15’s results suggested otherwise.
As a result, newly unearthed documents show, Study 15 suffered the same fate as many industry-sponsored trials that yield data drugmakers don’t like: It got buried. It took eight years before a taxpayer-funded study rediscovered what Study 15 had found — and raised serious concerns about an entire new class of expensive drugs.
Study 15 was silenced in 1997, the same year Seroquel was approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat schizophrenia. The drug went on to be prescribed to hundreds of thousands of patients around the world and has earned billions for London-based AstraZeneca International — including nearly $12 billion in the past three years.
The results of Study 15 were never published or shared with doctors, even as less rigorous studies that came up with positive results for Seroquel were published and used in marketing campaigns aimed at physicians and in television ads aimed at consumers. The results of Study 15 were provided only to the Food and Drug Administration — and the agency has strenuously maintained that it does not have the authority to place such studies in the public domain.
AstraZeneca spokesman Tony Jewell defended the Seroquel research and said the company had disclosed the drug’s risks. Since 1997, the drug’s labeling has noted that weight gain and diabetes were seen in study patients, although the company says the data are not definitive. The label states that the metabolic disorders may be related to patients’ underlying diseases. (finish here)
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