WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 A U.S. senator wants pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline to explain what actions, if any, it took after a report was leaked to it about one of its drugs.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, made the request Wednesday in a letter to Christopher Viehbacher, president of GlaxoSmithKline's U.S. division.
The incident involved a peer reviewer for The New England Journal of Medicine -- Steven Haffner of the University of Texas Health Science Center --who leaked a damaging study concerning GSK's diabetes drug Avandia (rosiglitazone) to the pharmaceutical firm ahead of the report's publication last May.
The study reported a link between heart attacks and the drug that controls glucose levels in diabetics.
Haffner faxed the report 17 days before its publication to a GSK employee whom he knew from working on an earlier clinical trial of the drug. But Haffner said no one asked him to send GSK the study's results.
"Why I sent it is a mystery," Haffner told the journal Nature. "I don't really understand it. I wasn't feeling well. It was bad judgment."
Copyright 2008 by UPI
