Sen. Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, says that the FDA’s Drug Safety Oversight Board voted 8-7 on Oct. 2 to keep the scandal-plagued diabetes drug Avandia on the market. The result was kept from the public.
Wow, what a nailbiter. That’s enough to give Glaxo execs a heart attack [...]

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From HealthDay News:
The widely used but controversial diabetes drug Avandia will now have a strong “black box” warning on its label, advising users of an increased risk of heart failure, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced late Tuesday. Another four diabetes drugs from the same class, including Actos, will also carry a similar black-box [...]

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Glaxo pulled a rabbit out of the hat in its earnings report today with a little misdirection. Per MarketWatch:
GlaxoSmithKline on Wednesday took some of the attention away from disappointing sales of diabetes drugs by announcing it was lifting its stock buyback authorization to 12 billion pounds ($24.7 billion).
Experts expected to see Glaxo report a [...]

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It appears someone finally decided to take a look at the effectiveness and benefits of older diabetes drugs (such as metformin) compared with newer, more expensive ones (such as Avandia). Dr. Shari Bolen of Johns Hopkins University studied various medical databases and found 216 relevant studies and two systematic reviews. According to Reuters:
Older [...]

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Remember when you were a kid in school and the teacher asked a question that no one in class knew the answer to? The teacher would give clues until finally the answer would become blatantly obvious, and everyone at once would raise their hand with the teacher’s desired answer. Somehow this news story [...]

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Here’s the story.
Drug companies are going to try to get away with everything they can to make a profit, that’s a given. The FDA should be the regulatory force that keeps Big Pharma in check instead of being its accomplice.
As long as the FDA is getting its paycheck from Big Pharma, drugs are going [...]

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Although we already know why Avandia is still on the market, the FDA released the preliminary results of its evaluation of the GlaxoSmithKline drug. Here are the results via the Washington Post:
The government’s own preliminary evaluation of the diabetes pill Avandia confirms the heart risks reported in a study earlier this week and suggests that [...]

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Marilynn Marchione from the Associated Press asked a good question in her article today:
How does a drug go from blockbuster to bust?
How can big safety issues go undetected in medicines taken by millions of people for many years, as happened this week with the diabetes pill Avandia and a few years ago with the [...]

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