When Does a Biotech Press Release Constitute Fraud?

What can you say in a press release about a clinical trial? "Darn near anything, apparently" will be the response from many people who've been seeing them over the years. But really, what can you say, legally? Is there some point where you've clearly crossed the line into fraud, or are all these things just varying interpretations of scientific data? That uncomfortable question has been working its way through the court system in the person of W. Scott Harkonen, former CEO of Intermune. This case is back in the news thanks to a long article in the Washington Post (pointed out to me by a reader of this blog in the comments section here). Here's the background: Intermune was selling Actimmune (interferon gamma-1b) for two rare-disease indications, but wanted to break into the much larger market for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), for which there were basically no therapies at all. Unfortunately, the trial didn't go the way that everyone had hoped. Here's the Washington Post's take on it, complete with quotation marks around the phrase "statistical significance": In all, 330 patients were randomly assigned to get either interferon gamma-1b or placebo injections. Disease progression or death occurred in 46 percent of those on the drug and 52 percent of those on placebo. That was not a significant difference, statistically speaking. When only survival was considered, however, the drug looked better: 10 percent of people getting the drug died, compared with 17 percent of t...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs