Three doctors affiliated with the National Institutes of Health have taken a public stand against tactics employed by pharmaco Eli Lilly to market its anti-sepsis drug Xigris. The doctors say Lilly has engaged in a no-holds-barred battle to win market share for Xigris, which with revenues of $200 million a year has fallen far short of sales projections. In an article for the New England Journal of Medicine, the physicians say that Lilly inappropriately used PR tactics to spread rumors that the drug, monumentally expensive at $8,000 for a four-day course of treatment, was in short supply due to rationing. It appears that they were hoping doctors would pressure health plans, who were doubtless also in Lilly's sights. The article's authors also criticize the drug company's decision to fund the "Surviving Sepsis" campaign, led by physicians with financial ties to Lilly.
While the campaign developed treatment guidelines which--surprise, surprise!--encouraged the use of Xigris, the journal article's authors say that older, dramatically cheaper antibiotics work equally well. In fact, they suggest that it may be unethical not to use antibiotics, given that they are known to be effective while Xigris is still comparatively untested. The NIH doctors authoring the journal article are not the first to criticize Xigris, which has been on the market since 2001. An advisory panel reviewing the drug prior to approval by the FDA had significant doubts as to its efficacy, The New York Times reports.
To get more background on the Xigris furor:
- read this article in The New York Times
- read this NPR piece