Lee Howard
TheDay.com
October 4, 2009

A lawsuit filed against Pfizer Inc. two years ago and just unsealed last month calls into question the safety of the company’s popular antipsychotic drug Geodon as well as the reputation of some of the researchers who worked on its clinical trials.

The lawsuit, filed by Dr. Stefan Kruszewski of Harrisburg, Pa., alleges that three of the researchers who helped conduct Geodon clinical trials – Dr. Richard Borison, Dr. Bruce Diamond and Dr. Louis Fabre – have been sanctioned by regulatory authorities. Borison and Diamond were debarred by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and received prison time, according to the suit, and Fabre earned sanctions in Texas for research misconduct.

”Pfizer’s reliance on clinical researchers with a known history of professional misconduct” – which news reports indicate go back at least as far as a 1997 indictment of Borison and Diamond and included the FDA’s 2005 shutdown of Fabre’s clinical-testing facility – “demonstrates the lengths to which the company is willing to go to facilitate its ‘positive’ clinical trials’ reporting,” according to the suit.

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