A hard-hitting article in one of the nation’s most prestigious medical journals claims the maker of the widely used heart failure drug Natrecor is circumventing concerns over patient safety while watching revenues soar.One of the country’s top cardiologists asserts that Scios Inc., a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, continues to aggressively market Natrecor even as the drug comes under increased scrutiny for links to kidney failure and death. “It’s a pattern. We saw it with Vioxx and some of the cox-2 inhibitor drugs, and we’re seeing it now with Natrecor,” said Dr. Eric Topol, author of the article, which appears in the July 14 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. “The twist here is that the aggressive marketing is through the medical community. With other drugs, it’s direct-to-consumer advertising.""Other than that, we have the themes of manuscripts published in prestigious journals with key omissions of data, the FDA approving drugs without mandating key trials, and companies aggressively pursuing sales and marketing of their drugs,” continued Topol, who is chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine and chief academic officer at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.
