Yale School of Medicine researchers have found that a clinical trial of the epilepsy drug gabapentin may have been a "seeding trial" used by a pharmaceutical company to promote the drug and increase prescriptions, according to a report in the June issue of Archives of Internal Medicine. As described in the study by Yale assistant professor of medicine Joseph Ross, M.D., and his colleagues, a seeding trial is a clinical trial conducted primarily for marketing purposes and intended to promote the drug and increase prescribing by exposing physician-investigators to it.
