Emails Allege Glaxo Based Ghostwritten Drug Study on "Stolen" Data
Internal emails from the University of Pennsylvania psychiatry department go into depressing and comical detail about how GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) paid academic ghostwriters to write research papers about the antidepressant Paxil as if they were flowing from the keyboard of luminaries such as Prof. Charles Nemeroff.
The emails form the basis of a charge of research misconduct leveled by one of the professors, Jay Amsterdam, who is asking the federal Office of Research Integrity to investigate the studies to see if there was any misuse of funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Although the study was first published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2001, it has surfaced again, in part, because the Project on Government Oversight wants Dr. Amy Gutmann, the chair of President Obama's bioethics commission to resign. Gutmann was president of UPenn during the Paxil flap. (Management lesson: you can't bury bodies that don't want to stay buried.)
The emails show that back in 2000, ghostwriting -- the undisclosed practice of paying a professional author to write research papers and then adding the name of a prominent professor as the author -- wasn't regarded as an ethical problem at UPenn. (It's now widely banned in academia.) GSK's ghostwriting program carried the internal name "CASSPER," which stood for "Case Study Publications for Peer Review."
"Authors" didn't see the manuscript
The emails begin with Amsterdam complaining that one of his colleages, Dr. Laszlo Guylai, had taken his data on a Paxil study in which he had recruited the majority of patients, and that Guylai and a team including Dr. Dwight Evans were about to publish an analysis of the data under their own names. In response, Karl Rickels, chief of the mood disorders section of the UPenn Medical Center, told Amsterdam that "SKB" -- meaning SmithKline Beecham, a forerunner company to GSK -- was in charge of the study and that the authors hadn't even seen the manuscript (click to enlarge):
Guylai, who thought he was going to be the lead author on the paper until GSK switched his name for Nemeroff's, admitted that GSK controlled the study and that he'd had little input into its writing after the early drafts:
"Stolen" data
When the study was published, Amsterdam wrote again to Rickels, describing his data as "stolen":
He also accused Guylai of plagiarizing his data. While the published study did disclose that GSK had provided funding for the research, it did not disclose that the paper had been written by one if its own paid authors. UPenn told Nature News it would look again at the allegations, although the university previously described the allegations as unfounded.
Normally, when students are found plagiarizing their work, they receive failing grades and can even be kicked out of school entirely. Today, Nemeroff is the chairman of psychiatry at the University of Miami in Florida.
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