Glaxo Paper At Center Of Fabricated Data Scandal Is Retracted

As a postscript to a scandal that enmeshed GlaxoSmithKline over fabricated data, Nature Medicine has now formally retracted a controversial 2010 paper that led five employees, including the senior vp and head of R&D in Shanghai, China, to leave the drugmaker. The paper, which appeared three years ago, examined the role of a protein called Interleukin-7 receptor in treating autoimmune disease (back story). The disclosure greatly embarrassed Glaxo, which months earlier vowed to change its practices after agreeing to plead guilty and pay $3 billion in the US to resolve criminal and civil charges in connection with off-label promotion of several drugs, failing to report safety data and reporting false prices. Glaxo subsequently became mired in a bribery scandal in China, as well. To fend off criticism, the drugmaker sought the retraction and dismissed Jingwu Zang, the former R&D head. Although he took responsibility for the paper as a corresponding author, he later maintained that he was  fired for inadvertently influencing an internal investigation by speaking with others involved in the paper, but was unaware the probe concerned that specific paper and that he was also a target. The retraction says the Glaxo (GSK) investigation found that data appearing in two charts “were erroneously attributed to experiments at Baylor Medical College with blood cells from patients with multiple sclerosis. In fact, no data from experiments with blood cells from patients with multipl...
Source: Pharmalot - Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: Source Type: blogs