Lilly Is Not Amused

Eli Lilly fired off a press release today, noting its objections to how it handled data in clinical trials of its anti-depressant Prozac. This all comes in response to the New York Times' coverage of the New England Journal of Medicine study of the other day which revealed that a number of negative studies for anti-depressants had gone unpublished, allowing manufacturers to make unjustifiably outsized claims about the effectiveness of their drugs. There's some coverage of Lilly's response here. And Lilly's press release is here.

Lilly claims:

"Not only was the Times' story inaccurate when it comes to Prozac -- the NEJM article didn't identify a single Prozac study as unpublished -- but it also likely created a strong false impression with readers that Lilly suppresses data."

Lilly is right that other drugs--Zoloft and Paxil among them--were more the beneficiaries of a false bounce than was Prozac, based upon the study, which I've previously written about here.

But as far as false impressions of data suppression go, I'm afraid it's Lilly using this moment to turn itself into something it wasn't until the very recent past. The press release notes:

"In December 2004, Lilly was widely recognized as the first pharmaceutical company to voluntarily launch a clinical trials registry, where we post the results of all Lilly sponsored registration clinical trials for all of our marketed products dating back to 1994, and all clinical trials for marketed products since December 2004."

Let's see: Prozac comes off-patent in 2001 and is no longer flashed before the public as in the 1990s when the company was repeatedly accused of hiding clinical trials data, accusations which I happen to believe are factual. Three years later in 2004, the company decides to become more transparent and then posts all the old studies to the web. It's nice that Lilly is playing catch-up, but that hardly absolves the company of its past behavior and the bad old days when Lilly suppressed data.

I'd say the company earned its reputation long ago.

Speaking of which, one of the charms of the Zyprexa documents is to read through them and listen to Lilly execs talk about how its sales force should never admit to a connection between cases of diabetes, explosive weight gain, hyperglycemia, pancreatitis and its star drug Zyprexa. Even more fun is when Japanese regulators slapped warning labels on the drug in 2002 and within months Lilly had its sales force in PCPs' office throughout America telling docs that the drug was safe as could be and should be pressed upon agitated women.

That's some nice transparency.