"The success can be seen in the huge numbers the campaign generated with 4.9 billion in sales in 2009," Kenney pointed out.
"It's particularly disconcerting that AstraZeneca successfully co-opted large portions of psychiatric academic community," he added.
"The manipulation and misuse of Seroquel scientific data to support AstraZeneca's off-label marketing campaign was the most disturbing aspect of the case to me," Kruszewski said in the press release. "There were strong indications from AstraZeneca's earliest clinical trials that Seroquel increased the risk of diabetes and induced profound sedation out of proportion to its weak antipsychotic effects."
"In
the elderly population, they basically marketed Seroquel as an
expensive sleeping pill and put hundreds of thousands of patients at
risk for serious medical complications, premature cardiovascular
disease, pneumonias, and premature death," he reported.
In addition to paying $520 million, Astra had to enter into a 5-year corporate integrity agreement that requires the company to post information about payments to doctors on its website, which no doubt will include payments funneled through front groups like NAMI, for Continuing Medical Education programs, speaker fees, research grants, and the various awards given out each years.
Because according to the DOJ press release, the government contends that Astra "promoted the unapproved uses by improperly and unduly influencing the content of, and speakers, in company-sponsored Continuing Medical Education programs."
"The company also engaged doctors to give promotional speaker programs on unapproved uses for Seroquel and to conduct studies on unapproved uses of Seroquel," it says. "In addition, the company recruited doctors to serve as authors of articles that were ghostwritten by medical literature companies and about studies the doctors in question did not conduct. AstraZeneca then used those studies and articles as the basis for promotional messages about unapproved uses of Seroquel."
According to a recent report by Jim Edwards on BNET, former NAMI policy director and board member, Jim Dailey, was a paid consultant for Astra's Seroquel marketing team, and was paid $600, plus airfare and limousine service, to attend one Seroquel consultant meeting in December 2003.
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