Pfizer Email on "Negligible Evidence" for Neurontin as a Bipolar Drug Is Focus of Lawyers' Tug-of-War

An email in the Neurontin litigation that Pfizer claims should be sealed shows former Pfizer vp/neuroscience Atul Pande telling a colleague that there is "negligible evidence" for the use of Neurontin in bipolar disorder and that the drug is "not a good anti-manic treatment."

Pande (pictured) is now an svp/neuroscience at GlaxoSmithKline. But from February 2003 to November 2005 he was at Pfizer, according to his Linkedin page. The email became controversial because a plaintiffs' expert witness, Dr. David Egilman, sent a truncated copy of it to another witness in the case, the doctor who treated Hartley Shearer, a Massachusetts man whose family claims he killed himself after taking the drug.

Pfizer argues that Egilman tampered with the witness to whom he sent Pande's email, and that the email was confidential (download the brief here). The company wants sanctions against Egilman:

In its original form, as produced by Pfizer subject to a confidential designation, it is a two-page document containing several e-mails back and forth. Astonishingly, the document that Dr. Egilman sent to Dr. Catapano-Friedman is only one page and key portions of the document were deleted without any indication on the document that it had been materially altered.

But the Shearer family lawyers argue that in fact the email is not sealed, and has been filed as a normal exhibit in Massachusetts federal district court (download the brief here):

Counsel for Sales and Marketing Plaintiffs advised that Exhibit 18, along with the other exhibits listed in the Rona Declaration, were filed unsealed with the Court. ... Furthermore, the substance of the e-mail in question was placed in a publicly available legal document; it was quoted in a Statement of Facts, filed by Sales and Marketing Plaintiffs, ECF Doc. # 1760

So what does the controversial email actually say? BNET could not locate a copy of the email on the court's web-docket (it's probably filed as a hard copy with the court) but there is a description of its contents in a "Statement of Facts" filed as a pretrial memo by the plaintiffs. It says:

After learning of the results of his own study, 945-209, as well as the results from the Frye and Guille studies, Dr. Atul Pande admitted that Neurontin has a "weak, if any, anti-manic effect" and that there is "negligible evidence" supporting its use in bipolar disorder. Dr. Pande further admitted: "There is pretty good consensus among experts in the area that gabapentin is not a good anti-manic treatment."

Here's an image of the document:

(Download the entire Statement of Facts here.)

The lawsuit alleges Pfizer and/or its Warner-Lambert unit promoted Neurontin off-label for bipolar disorder, even though one of its warnings is for suicidal behavior.

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