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VOL.451 NO.7178 DATED 31 JANUARY 2008
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Journal reviewer leaked Avandia study results to drug firm
A peer reviewer for The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) broke confidentiality rules and leaked a damaging report about the blockbuster diabetes drug Avandia to the drug’s manufacturer weeks ahead of publication, Nature has learned.
"Why I sent it is a mystery," the reviewer, Steven Haffner of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, told Nature. "I don’t really understand it. I wasn’t feeling well. It was bad judgement."
Avandia (rosiglitazone) came under heavy scrutiny last year, after the NEJM published an analysis of the drug’s efficacy and safety, which showed that the drug increased the risk of heart attack by 43% in people who took it for at least 24 weeks. The report garnered widespread media attention, prompted the US Food and Drug Administration to issue a safety alert, and cut the stock price of Avandia’s manufacturer, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), by 13%.
But 17 days earlier, Haffner had faxed his copy of the article to Alexander Cobitz, a GSK employee whom Haffner knew from working on an earlier clinical trial of the drug...
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New York City to police air monitoring
Taking stock of the Big Apple’s air and water may soon be more difficult for researchers. A new bill from the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg would make it a misdemeanour to possess or use a chemical, biological or radiological detector without a permit issued by the city’s police department.
"For public safety reasons we need to know who is using these devices," says Jason Post, the mayor’s deputy press secretary. The legislation, which would be the first of its kind in the United States, is designed to regulate a growing number of firms that sell environmental sensors to ward against terrorist attacks. But some say that it is too vague and would include thousands of privately held sensors used routinely to monitor the city’s air and water quality.
"At best, it would just be adding a huge level of bureaucracy and expense," says environmental geochemist Steven Chillrud of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York, who is helping lead a movement against the bill along with two Columbia colleagues.
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