The agency's safeguards against potential conflicts of interest are not designed to prevent such future financial ties. In examining compensation records from drug companies to physicians who advised FDA on whether to approve 28 psychopharmacologic, arthritis, and cardiac or renal drugs between 20, Science found widespread after-the-fact payments or research support to panel members. During that period, for example, AstraZeneca says it paid Halperin more than $11,000 in expenses and fees for work on an advisory board, service on a data monitoring committee for a clinical trial of Brilinta led by the University of California, San Francisco, and for his service chairing the data monitoring committee for an AstraZeneca-sponsored multimillion-dollar clinical trial of Brilinta led by Duke University.īrilinta fits a pattern of what might be called pay-later conflicts of interest, which have gone largely unnoticed-and entirely unpoliced. For example, those companies paid or reimbursed cardiologist Jonathan Halperin of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City more than $200,000 for accommodations, honoraria, and consulting from 2013 to 2016. As Brilinta's sales took off later, however, AstraZeneca and firms selling or developing similar cardiovascular therapies showered the four with money for travel and advice. Before the Brilinta vote, the agency mentioned no financial conflicts among the voting panelists, who included four physicians. It cuts risk of death from vascular causes, heart attacks, and strokes modestly more than its chief competitor-and currently costs 25 times as much.įDA, headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland, uses a well-established system to identify possible conflicts of interest before such advisory panels meet. The drug, ticagrelor, marketed under the name Brilinta, sold rapidly, emerging as a billion-dollar blockbuster. By day's end, the panel voted seven to one to approve. In the cool refuge of the conference room, advisers politely questioned company scientists and complimented their work. That day, panel members heard presentations on the drug's preclinical and clinical data from agency staff and AstraZeneca in Cambridge, U.K., its maker and one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. The panel is one of dozens of advisory committees that vote each year on whether the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should approve a therapy for the U.S. On a sweltering July day in 2010, seven medical researchers and one patient advocate gathered in a plush Marriott hotel in College Park, Maryland, to review a promising drug designed to prevent heart attacks and strokes by limiting blood clotting.
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