Greedy and Ghostly Scientists

Story one: Zachary Stowe, psychiatrist at Emory University becomes Charles Nemeroff, Jr. Read all about it the Carlat Psychiatry Blog and University Diaries. And check out the WSJ Health Blog as well. The gist is that Stowe apparently did not report all of his external income from his many pharmaceutical industry gigs. Better yet, he was a frequent speaker for GlaxoSmithKline, which had the gall to cancel two of his commercial talks. He then wanted GSK to pay him even though he wasn't going to give the speeches. Read the relevant emails toward the bottom of this document. After reading about Stowe, refresh your memory about Golden Goblet Lifetime Achievement Award Winner, former Chair of Psychiatry at Emory University: Charles Nemeroff. Is there something in the water at Emory? Or is that just how we roll in modern academic psychiatry? Stowe is hereby nominated for a coveted Golden Goblet for his string of emails in which he attempted to shake down GlaxoSmithKline. Sometimes I think that the only thing worse than drug companies are the narcissistic academics who they employ as "key opinion leaders." Not all key opinion leaders are jerks; some are probably even able to reasonably balance their industry cash with being good scientists. But Stowe didn't really portray himself as Mr. Nice Guy in his string of soon to be infamous emails.

Oh, and this little gem:

"Especially disturbing is an email between employees at GSK and a public relations (PR) firm that the GSK hired. The email was titled “For your review/Paxil Breast Milk Press Release” and states:

"[P]lease review the attached press release and forward me any comments/edits.
As you may know, Dr. Stowe is on board for publicity efforts and NAME
REDACTED and I are coordinating time to meet with him next week to arm him
with the key messages for this announcement, which is slated for early February.
We are sending the release for your review at the same time in efforts to secure
distribution on Emory letterhead (as you know, would provide further credibility
to data for the media)."

In his testimony, Dr. Stowe confirmed that the press release was written by the PR
firm and concerned his research on Paxil and its presence in breast milk. He also
explained that placing the press release on Emory letterhead, as opposed to GSK letterhead, would make the data more credible to the public."

If I have this straight, Stowe was willing to place a press release written by a PR firm hired by GSK on official university letterhead to enhance its credibility. Apparently he wasn't concerned about his own credibility. Read the full document of Senator Charles Grassley's investigation of Dr. Stowe.

Part 2: Enter the Ghostwriters

One snippet, then go to Bloomberg for the rest:

Ensuring that medical journal articles presented Zyprexa study results in a positive light was one way for Lilly to reach its sales goal, company officials said in its plan, according to the documents. To do that, Lilly officials hired ghostwriters to prepare submissions to journals such as Progress in Neurology and Psychiatry, according to the unsealed documents. “The paper for the Progress in Neurology and Psychiatry supplement has been completed and sent to the journal for peer review,” Kerrie Mitchell, an employee of the public relations agency Cohn & Wolfe, wrote in a Feb. 23, 2001, e-mail to Michael Sale, a Lilly marketing official. The message was among the unsealed files. “We ‘ghost’ wrote this article and then worked with author Dr. Haddad to work up the final copy,” Mitchell said in the e- mail. Eric Litchfield, a spokesman for Cohn & Wolfe, didn’t immediately return a call requesting comment.

The Bloomberg story is based on a recently released set of internal Lilly documents. That's right -- more Zyprexa documents are on the loose. And the first round of documents provided some good stuff (1, 2, 3), so I can't wait to see what kind of chicanery will be revealed by the latest round. In one sense, it's not exactly news that Lilly ghostwrote Zyprexa papers. We all know that ghostwriting is rampant. How else do key opinion leaders get their names on dozens of papers per year when they are also flying around the country pimping drugs, holding administrative meetings, and doing all sorts of other tasks? But it's nice to have it officially documented that Lilly was playing the ghostwriting game with Zyprexa.

Friday, June 12, 2009