painkiller

> Winston-Salem, NC-based Wake Forest Baptist clinic is using Botox to treat stroke victims. Report

> Two Florida clinics have been ordered to halt performing abortions. Owner James Pendergraft, M.D. has had his medical license suspended and is accused of performing illegal third-trimester abortions. …

Johnson & Johnson won FDA approval for a medical device designed to deliver painkillers to hospitalized patients at the touch of a button. The Ionsys system delivers the opiod painkiller fentanyl cutaneously through a patch into the bloodstream. The company says the technology has built-in safeguards designed to prevent abuse.

- read this Wall Street Journal article (sub. req.)

Former Merck CEO Raymond Gilmartin testified in the punitive damages phase of the company's trial in Atlantic City, NJ. As expected, Gilmartin defended Merck's handling of the painkiller, arguing again that his company did not intentionally conceal risks associated with the drug. Gilmartin stepped down from his post in late 2004 as Merck struggled to recover from the fallout of the Vioxx revelations. The highlight of the showdown between the ex-CEO and plaintiff lawyer W. Mark Lanier …

A jury in Atlantic City, New Jersey awarded $4.5 million to a man who said he suffered a heart attack after taking Vioxx. The jury rejected a second man's claim, agreeing with defense attorneys who argued that he lacked sufficient evidence to show that he took the drug consistently. Experts had predicted that Merck would do well in New Jersey, considered home turf for the Whitehouse Station-based company.

The decision appears to seriously damage Merck's key defense of the …

The latest Vioxx trial opened in Atlantic City, New Jersey on Monday. Houston lawyer W. Mark Lanier hopes to repeat last year's win in a Texas courtroom. Thomas Cona of Cherry Hill blames his heart attack on the painkiller, as does fellow plaintiff John McDarby. Merck withdrew Vioxx from the market in 2004 after a study showed the drug doubled the risk of heart attacks and strokes if taken for an eighteen month. The drugmaker is expected to argue that neither Cona or McDarby took the drug …

The Cox-2 controversy is back in the news. A study published in The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine has found that people who take the painkiller Celebrex roughly double their chances of having a heart attack. The research was conducted by Dr. Richard Beasley of the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand. Beasley and his team looked for data for about 13,000 patients, drawn from 6 earlier clinical trials. Celebrex, made by Pfizer, is in the same class as Vioxx, which …

Merck said it will consider settling a limited number of the Vioxx lawsuits filed against it. In an interview Thursday, the company's general counsel said the company is weighing settling cases which meet certain narrow criteria, particularly those in which the painkiller was taken for more than 18 months. Kenneth Fraser said the company may settle a "small number of the suits" filed against it. Fraser ruled out a "broad global settlement," however. Legal observers say the decision is an …

Pharma watchers continue to struggle to make sense of the verdict in Ernst v. Merck as the focus of attention shifts toward upcoming cases facing the drug company, particularly the trial scheduled to start in September in Atlantic City, New Jersey. On Monday, Wall Street analyst Catherine Arnold doubled her earlier estimate of the drug maker's liability for the painkiller to $10 billion as a result of the company's defeat in the case. To put those numbers in perspective: on Friday, the …

Meanwhile, in another potentially ominous development for Merck, the AP is reporting that it has obtained documents showing that Merck began work on a method of reducing the cardiovascular dangers of Cox-2 inhibitors in 1998, a fact that critics are likely to interpret as proof that the company was fully aware of the risks associated with the drug before it went on the market in 1999.

- see this …

News of the Vioxx verdict dominates the media this morning. While the $253.5 million in damages awarded to the widow of a user of the painkiller who died of a heart attack in 2001 will likely be sharply reduced, most observers are agreed that the impact of the decision is likely to be felt for years.

How did it happen and what does it mean? Opinion is divided. The New York Times writes that the hardball tactics pursued by the defense team misfired completely, leaving the …