Drug testing and PPD
Though the pharmaceutical company might not look too kindly on it, there’s a prominent mention of Wilmington’s own PPD in the Jan. 7 issue of The New Yorker.
It seems that Big Pharma companies have been hiring people to take experimental drugs — and paying handsomely for it — for several years now. It used to be that most drug studies took place in medical schools and teaching hospitals. As the story reports, as recently as 1991 80% of “industry-sponsored trials were conducted in academic health centers.” But financial pressure to bring drugs to market quicker than academic bureaucracies can deliver has led Big Pharma to move trials to the private sector.
Some carrying out clinical trials apparently have little training in how to conduct research. The story explains:
The FDA asked the pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis to perform new studies of the antibiotic Ketek, which was suspected of causing liver failure. Reports later revealed that the top recruiting investigator hired by PPD, the firm contracted to conduct the studies, tested the antibiotic on clients in a weight-loss clinic that she ran in Alabama. She was sentenced to five years in federal prison for fraud.
Ouch.
(The New Yorker website contains no electronic version of this story.)
Great post, R. You can easily imagine this sort of sketchy mini-economy springing up around a company whose tagline is “No one gets medicine into the system faster.”