Return to Celebrex® homepage on SSEM.COM
Dr. Michael Wolfe, a gastroenterologist at Boston University, admits he was duped by the Pharmacia Corporation, the manufacturer of Celebrex® prior to its purchase by Pfizer in 2003.
In the summer of 2000, The Journal of the American Medical Association asked Wolfe to write a review of a study showing that Celebrex® was associated with lower rates of stomach and intestinal ulcers than two older arthritis medications, diclofenac and ibuprofen. At the time Wolfe found the study, tracking 8,000 patients over a six-month period, persuasive, and penned a favorable review, which helped to drive up Celebrex® sales.
By early of the next year, while serving on the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) arthritis advisory committee, Wolfe had an occasion to review the same Celebrex® study again, and was "flabbergasted" by what he saw. Pharmacia's study had run for one year, not six-months, as the company originally led both Wolfe and the Journal to believe. When the complete data was reviewed, most of Celebrex's® advantages disappeared because the ulcer complications that occurred during the second half of the study were disproportionately found in patients taking the drug.
"I am furious," Wolfe told The Washington Post in 2001. "I looked like a fool, but all I had available to me was the data presented in the article." Remarkably, none of the Journal study's 16 authors, including 8 university professors, had spoken out publicly about this egregious suppression of negative data. All the authors were either employees of Pharmacia or paid consultants of the company.
If you believe that you or a relative were injured by taking Celebrex® please use the form below to contact our law firm.
Copyright © 1999-2008 Specter Specter Evans & Manogue, P.C.
Terms of Use | Privacy Policy
