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"And you listed Doctor Altshuler, Doctor Wisner, Doctor Burt, Doctor Yonkers, Doctor Cohen, Doctor Nemeroff, Doctor Stowe, and Doctor Szuba," she pointed out.
"They are generally respected in the medical community?," she asked Healy.
"The issue of the degree of respect within the medical community is one that's open to question at the moment," Healy said.
"It would be interesting to know what the degree of respect for Doctor Nemeroff or Doctor Stowe in the medical community is at the moment," he added.
The latest news on Nemeroff came on January 4, 2010, when Pharmalot carried the headline: "Charles Nemeroff and the House That Glaxo Built?", and Ed Silverman wrote, "the controversial psychiatry professor who became a subject of a US Senate Finance Committee inquiry into academic research and pharma industry influence, is joining the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine."
"Of course, this means leaving his previous job at Emory University in Atlanta and so he's just purchased a $1.9 million house in the Coconut Grove section of Miami," Silverman said. "The 5,204-square-foot home has six bedrooms and seven bathrooms," according BlockShopper.
Nemeroff "came to the Senate committee's attention because he was accepting sizeable consulting fees from Glaxo at the same that he was the primary investigator on an NIH-funded grant for research into a Glaxo drug," he pointed out.
"In any event," Silverman wrote, "the new home appears big enough to house plenty of consulting materials."
Amazingly, none of the KOLs or advisory panel members on Glaxo's payroll discussed above, who are so "generally respected in the medical community," according to Varner, were recruited to testify for Glaxo in the first birth defect trial.
Ghostbusting
Yonkers now works at Yale, but she received her medical training at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, and completed a residency and fellowship at McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Lee Cohen and Adele Viguera are still at Harvard.
The month after the trial ended, in November 2009, Grassley sent letters to ten medical schools asking them to describe their policies on plagiarism and ghostwriting and to identify any complaints or investigations of faculty members dating back to 2004. The Universities included Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Duke, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania, Washington University, University of California at San Francisco, and University of Washington.
"Essentially, the companies are using the reputation of prestigious academic researchers and their institutions to promote the sale of drugs and devices," Grassley said in the letters.
"Articles published in medical journals are widely read by practitioners and are relied upon as being objective and scientific in nature," he wrote. "The information in these articles can have a significant impact on doctors' prescribing behavior and, in turn, on the American taxpayer, as the Medicare and Medicaid programs pay billions of dollars for prescription drugs and medical devices. "
"Any attempt to manipulate the scientific literature, which can in turn mislead doctors to prescribe treatments that may be ineffective and/or cause harm to their patients, is very troubling," Grassley said.
"Students are disciplined for not acknowledging that a paper they turned in was written by somebody else," Grassley said. "But what happens when researchers at the same university publish medical studies without acknowledging that they were written by somebody else?"
