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Cleveland Clinic and Celebrex PRECISION trial
Can it be fair and unbiased?
The Cleveland Clinic has been asked by
Pfizer to handle the PRECISION trial - a study to assess the safety and effectiveness of
Celebrex, a Cox-2 drug that now
carries a black-box warning. Another Cox-2 drug Vioxx has been recalled and is reported to have killed as many as 60,000 Americans. The third drug in the category,
Bextra, was
also banned.
So the question is If one can trust that the Cleveland Clinic
to produce unbiased results? In the normal course this would have been an irrelevant question considering that the
U.S.News & World Report named it as one of the top four hospitals in its annual "America's Best Hospitals" survey. But the manner in which it handled the demotion of Dr. Eric Topol is raising many doubts about its fairness and independence.
Plus, the Wall
Street Journal has raised questions about disclosure
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So who is Dr. Eric Topol?
He is one of the top cardiologists in the world, and also, an
early critic of Vioxx. No wonder then that he was not on Merck's, or for that matter on any drugmaker's Christmas card list. Merck is known to have successfully destroyed or tried to destroy the careers of many Vioxx
critics, that include Dr.
Gurkirpal Singh and Professor
Lee Simon.
While no one knows what prompted the decision to demote Topol, but two days after he testified against
Merck in the first federal trial in
Houston, he was essentially given a subtle message that he was no longer welcome at the Clinic - something that
Dr. David Graham,
another critic of Vioxx, has already experienced at the
FDA.
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Cleveland Clinic's conflicts of interest
It is no secret that the
drugmakers, hospitals,
doctors, academicians, the FDA, and politicians are all in bed together and often do things that are not in the best interests of American people. And now according to a report by Sarah Treffinger of
Cleveland on the interview of
Dr. Topol by Dr. Robert Califf, director of Duke University's Clinical Research Institute, it has come to light that the
Cleveland Clinic has a stake in a venture capital firm that invested in a medical device firm, AtriCure, and was also using its device on patients. So when Topol, who served on a committee that recommended that the Clinic not have a relationship with AtriCure,
he was stripped of one of his titles.
It
came as no surprise the that Dr. Topol left the
Clinic in February, 2006. |
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