AstraZeneca agreed to a $520 million dollar settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice and a consortium of state Medicaid agencies without admitting any wrongdoing in its marketing of the atypical antipsychotic drug, Seroquel.
“AstraZeneca paid kickbacks to doctors as part of an illegal scheme to market drugs for unapproved uses,” Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health and human services, said at the event in Washington. She said the company promoted drugs for unapproved uses by children, the elderly, veterans and prisoners.
Glenn Engelmann, AstraZeneca’s U.S. general counsel, released a statement saying the company denies the allegations but settled the investigation with the payment.
The government said the company also paid for ghostwritten journal articles, and marketed the drug to primary care and nursing home doctors targeting off-label, unapproved uses for Seroquel, including Alzheimer’s disease and anger management. A drug must gain U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for additional uses if the company wants to market those uses to doctors. Otherwise, doctors are free to prescribe a drug for any use they want.
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Color me not exactly shocked!
Last I heard, AZ is still pursuing an indication for using Seroquel for anxiety management. Yeah, patients won’t be anxious on this drug, because they won’t be awake to feel anything! And you are right, what is 10% of one year’s profit stream?
These novel antipsychotic drugs, they have a limited place in treating some disorders, but this push to be used for everything, that is absurd!
Unfortunately, we have seen time and again that these sort of fines have very little effect on the strategies employed by major pharma companies.
Personally, I am against the idea of kickbacks in the first place. Medicine should be prescribed based on benefit to the patient, and consideration for the patients circumstances (when they can take medicine or what they can take due to work environment and so on). It should not be prescribed based on the monetary gain of the prescribing physician.
I personally take Quetiapine Fumarate (Seroquel), in low doses, for a sleeping disorder related to PTSD and it works well for that. I have gone through many other sleeping medicines and arrived to this particular one after a long time of having minimal success with others, or no long term success on others.
I am also a student in Psychology and often think about best treatment practices. To me it just seems a little “icky” to be “paid off” by a company to prescribe certain medications to a patient. It looks a bit too much like a conflict of interest in my way of thinking.
Read the recent issue of Mother Jones about the travesties of clinical trials and the example of Seroquel possibly having a role to the death of a young schizophrenic patient. Not an easy read. But, the bigger picture is the corruption of clinical trials, not news to me and probably most of you, but nonetheless, just pathetic to read.