Thursday, March 31, 2016

PROPOSED Australia Settlement $250M: Defective J&J ASR hip







Sydney bus driver Joseph Pereira was a lead plaintiff in the case against Johnson & Johnson over faulty hip joints. Steven Siewert

by Marianna Papadakis
  • Mar 31 2016 at 4:40 PM Updated Mar 31 2016 at 4:40 PM
Pharmaceutical and medical devices giant Johnson & Johnson will pay $250 million for faulty hip replacements in the second-biggest class action settlement in Australia over the past decade.
The conditional agreement between Johnson & Johnson and its British subsidiary DePuy International and lawyers for 1700 Australians was lodged at a short hearing at Sydney's Federal Court on Thursday and must be approved by a judge.
The companies were sued by Shine Lawyers and Maurice Blackburn five years ago. There was a 17-week trial last year. The biggest class action settlement was $800 million for the Victorian bushfires cases.

The DePuy ASR resurfacing hip implant has led to a compensation package of $250 million from Johnson & Johnson. " 
The DePuy ASR resurfacing hip implant has led to a compensation package of $250 million from Johnson & Johnson. Supplied
Johnson & Johnson withdrew the DePuy ASR hip implants from sale in Australia in December 2009 and issued a formal hazard alert for the products in August 2010.
Maurice Blackburn Lawyers senior associate Julian Schimmel said the settlement, following the court's approval, meant patients could be compensated if they had or still needed corrective surgery because of problems with hip implants.
PARTS 'DEFECTIVE'
The law firms alleged the ASR hip implants, which provided a total hip replacement, were defective, not fit for their purpose and not of merchantable quality.

Mr Schimmel said the case was settled on a "no admissions" basis.
Shine Lawyers partner Rebecca Jancauskas said a compensation scheme to distribute the money would be devised to ensure compensation paid to each group member reflected their individual circumstances and losses.
"We estimate there are still hundreds of Australians who are yet to have hip revision surgery and the settlement scheme will remain open for these people to access the compensation they are entitled to," Ms Jancauskas said.
A Johnson & Johnson spokeswoman said the company still used the ASR devices and they performed well in some patients.
"The respondents' priority is, and always has been, patient safety," the spokeswoman said. "Since the recall decision was made, the respondents have worked to provide patients and surgeons directly with the information and support they need.
"They have continued to focus on the care and wellbeing of all ASR patients, their family members and surgeons."
Johnson & Johnson is appealing a separate case in the United States concerning different Pinnacle metal-on-metal hip implants after the company was ordered by a Texas federal jury to pay about $US500 million ($650 million) to five plaintiffs who claimed they were injured by the devices.


Friday, March 11, 2016

Make YOUR thoughts known now! Bayer Essure BLACK BOX warning is not enough!

This is the link:


The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Notice: Labeling for Permanent Hysteroscopically-Placed Tubal Implants Intended for Sterilization, Draft Guidance for Industry and Food and Drug Administration Staff; Availability

My information is public and I chose 'Individual Consumer'


"In 2010, the FDA paid to fly me to Silver Spring MD for three days of training to be a CDRH (medical device) Patient Representative.  I have never been called to serve on an Advisory Panel because nearly 100% of all medical devices go through the 510(k) -aka 510 pray- clearance method.  The device manufacturer names a predicate device, submits a fee and some paperwork and the clearance is approved.  Bayer Essure coils are rare in that they were cleared through PMA which protects the manufacturer from any litigation.   The women harmed by Bayer Essure are truly sacrificial lambs.  They were not informed that there is absolutely no warranty on this product and that their basic civil rights to a jury trial are null and void.  The harm perpetrated by this German conglomerate is assured by the current proposed legislation.  The PMA should be immediately revoked so that patient rights to justice are restored.  If Bayer conducted a legitimate scientific study and the product performs (patient outcomes) as advertised, this will come out in ‘discovery’.  In any case, there should not be any more insertion of these coils until the safety and effectiveness of this device are determined.  The leadership of the CDRH is questionable, at best.  Dr. Jeffrey Shuren’s entire household income is dependent upon the medical device industry(his wife, Allison is the partner at Arnold and Porter, LLP and prepares companies for device clearance).  Dr. William Maisel was arrested and convicted of soliciting a prostitute, yet he maintains his employment and is instrumental in clearing devices for women’s pelvic health (he is a cardiologist!).  This legislation is far too little and far too late. " 


Joleen Chambers Comment Tracking Number: 1k0-8ofc-rm8e

Thursday, March 3, 2016

FDA Commissioner Dr. Califf: The Fox is in the Henhouse!

F.D.A. Asks If Faulty Blood Monitor Tainted Xarelto Approval

By KATIE THOMAS FEB. 22, 2016
The Food and Drug Administration is investigating whether a faulty blood-testing device may have compromised the results of a clinical trial that led to the approval of Xarelto, a blockbuster anticlotting drug that has been prescribed to millions of Americans since it arrived on the market in 2011.

The agency has asked the drug’s manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson, detailed questions about whether there was evidence that the device was malfunctioning while the trial was underway, according to a legal brief filed in federal court on Monday by lawyers for patients and their families who say they were injured by the drug. The lawyers also cited internal company documents that they said showed doctors were complaining to the trial leadership during the course of the study.

The clinical trial, known as Rocket AF, was led by Dr. Robert M. Califf, currently President Obama’s nominee for head of the Food and Drug Administration. It involved more than 14,000 patients worldwide and took place from 2006 to 2010.
Xarelto, which is also known by its scientific name, rivaroxaban, is one of a new class of drugs that are seen as a replacement for warfarin, a cumbersome 60-year-old drug used to prevent strokes in people with a heart-rhythm disorder known as atrial fibrillation. Warfarin requires careful monitoring of a patient’s diet and drug regimen, and frequent blood tests to ensure that is working. If patients receive too little of the drug, they could experience a stroke. But if they receive too much, their lives could be threatened by catastrophic bleeding.
Questions about the trial have been stirring since last fall, when Johnson & Johnson and Bayer, which sells Xarelto overseas, notified regulators that the device that was used in the trial had been recalled in 2014 because it was understating patients’ risk of bleeding. The device, the INRatio sold by Alere, was used in the trial to help doctors gauge whether patients were getting the right dose of warfarin. The trial compared the number of strokes and bleeding events experienced by patients taking Xarelto to those of patients who were given warfarin.
Regulators are looking at whether the malfunctioning device might have led doctors to give patients the wrong dose of warfarin, which could have led to additional bleeding episodes and given an unfair advantage to Xarelto.
This month, researchers with the Duke Clinical Research Institute, which oversaw the trial, published their own analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine and concluded that the faulty device did not affect the trial’s outcome. A few days later, an analysis by the European Medicines Agency, the F.D.A.’s European counterpart, came to the same conclusion.
But rather than settling the matter, the analyses have raised additional questions and have come under harsh criticism from some medical experts. The Duke researchers, for example, never mentioned the existence of central laboratory tests — taken at two points during the trial — that could have been used to assess whether the device’s readings were accurate. And the analysis released by the European drug agency, while it did include those readings, was done by the companies themselves and not by independent statisticians.

“There are so many questions that are yet unaddressed,” said Dr. Harlan M. Krumholz, a cardiologist and director of the Yale University Open Data Access Project, which has an agreement with Johnson & Johnson to make the company’s data from clinical trials available to outside researchers. He has asked the company for access to the trial data, he said, and the company has agreed — but Bayer has refused.
Dr. Krumholz called on Alere to release more information about its device. “We do not know why the device did not work well,” he said.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for the F.D.A. said that while the agency was looking into the issue, it had not changed its recommendations for the drug, which “provides an important health benefit when used as directed.”
A spokeswoman for Alere declined to comment, and a representative for Duke referred to an earlier statement detailing the results of its reanalysis.
Johnson & Johnson said the INRatio device was selected because it was F.D.A.-approved and easy to use. It said it was not informed of the device recall until last September, when it and Bayer “acted with urgency, diligence and in the best interests of patients and prescribers.” The company said that it has provided answers to the questions the F.D.A. asked and that the analysis published in the New England Journal of Medicine confirmed the safety and efficacy of the drug.
A spokesman for Bayer said the company was confident in the results of the trial and dismissed the issue as being driven by plaintiffs’ lawyers, saying, “They have cherry-picked testimony and documents divorced from any context.”
Dr. Califf is the former director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute, which conducted the trial, and served as the study’s co-chairman. He has since left Duke and is now a deputy commissioner of the F.D.A. Dr. Califf, who did not respond to an email, has no role in the inquiry into the Rocket AF trial, the F.D.A. has said. The Senate was expected to vote Tuesday on whether to confirm his nomination as head of the agency.
Just as the trial was getting underway in 2006, the INRatio was facing scrutiny by the F.D.A. In 2005 and 2006, the agency sent warning letters to HemoSense, then the manufacturer of INRatio, claiming that the devices were generating “clinically significant” erroneous values and that the company, which was later acquired by Alere, was not properly investigating the complaints.
In 2014, Alere recalled the INRatio monitors, saying that they might provide inaccurate results.
However, the connection to the Rocket trial was not made public until this past fall, when a journalist for the British Medical Journal began asking the companies about it. A spokesman for Johnson & Johnson told the journal that the company had been unaware of the recall. The revelation led to the reanalysis by the Duke researchers as well as inquiries by the European Medicines Agency and the F.D.A.
But while the European agency concluded that the trial outcome was not affected by problems with the device, the F.D.A. appears to be taking a closer look, asking pointed questions about whether the company had evidence that the device was malfunctioning during the trial and what actions it took, according to the legal document, which was filed with Judge Eldon E. Fallon in the Eastern District of Louisiana.

The legal motion filed on Monday also cited internal emails that, the lawyers said, showed that some doctors were questioning the accuracy of the device while the trial was underway. The lawyers said so many concerns were raised about the device that a special program was set up to investigate the malfunctions, but none of these details were provided to the F.D.A. when Johnson & Johnson responded to the agency this month.
The Rocket trial has previously come under criticism. In 2011, the F.D.A.’s medical reviewers recommended against approval of Xarelto, citing concerns that the patients receiving warfarin during the trial were being poorly managed, which could give an unfair advantage to Xarelto.
An outside advisory committee later voted to approve the drug — although several members cited reservations — and the agency allowed it to go on the market. It has since become the best-selling drug in its class, bringing in $1.9 billion in the United States in 2015, according to Johnson & Johnson.
Some said the fact that Xarelto has been on the market since 2011 gave them faith in the safety of the product. “The real world has already made the case for this drug,” said Dr. Jürgen vom Dahl, a German cardiologist who served as an investigator in the trial, who said he did not recall encountering any problems with the device.
Dr. vom Dahl also said that he and his German colleagues have wondered whether Dr. Califf’s F.D.A. nomination was playing a role in the renewed questions about the trial. “We don’t know what is real science, and what is more politics,” he said.
But others say that plenty of questions remain, and that they are disheartened by a seeming reluctance by Duke, Johnson & Johnson and Bayer to be forthright about the problem.
“It depends on where you put the flashlight,” said Robert Powell, a clinical pharmacologist who has worked in the drug industry, as well as for six years at the F.D.A. “I think they were directing people away from the problem.”

Sabrina Tavernise contributed reporting.

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Any COI? Dr. Robert Califf: FDA Commissioner and former Duke University researcher.

Document Claims Drug Makers Deceived a Top Medical Journal

By KATIE THOMAS MARCH 1, 2016
It is a startling accusation, buried in a footnote in a legal briefing filed recently in federal court: Did two major pharmaceutical companies, in an effort to protect their blockbuster drug, mislead editors at one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals?
Lawyers for patients suing Johnson & Johnson and Bayer over the safety of the anticlotting drug Xarelto say the answer is yes, claiming that a letter published in The New England Journal of Medicine and written primarily by researchers at Duke University left out critical laboratory data. They claim the companies were complicit by staying silent, helping deceive the editors while the companies were in the midst of providing the very same data to regulators in the United States and Europe.

Duke and Johnson & Johnson contend that they worked independently of each other. Bayer declined to comment. And top editors at The New England Journal of Medicine said they did not know that separate laboratory data existed until a reporter contacted them last week, but they dismissed its relevance and said they stood by the article’s analysis.

But the claim — that industry influence led to the concealing of data — carries echoes, some experts said, of an earlier era of drug marketing, when crucial clinical data went missing from journal articles, leading to high-profile corrections and a wave of ethics policies to limit the influence of drug companies on medical literature.
“It just feels like it’s a real ethical breach,” said Dr. Lisa Schwartz, a professor of medicine at Dartmouth, of the failure to include the lab data in the letter. “If you know the direct answer to this question, then how can you not provide it to be able to give insight?”
Xarelto, which is sold in the United States by Johnson & Johnson and overseas by Bayer, had nearly $2 billion in United States sales last year and is the best seller in a new category of drugs seeking to replace warfarin, an older blood thinner. The two companies hired the Duke Clinical Research Institute to run a three-year clinical trial involving more than 14,000 patients that led to Xarelto’s approval by regulators. But those results have come under scrutiny since September, when the companies notified regulators that a blood-testing device used in the study had malfunctioned.
The trial compared the number of strokes and bleeding events experienced by patients taking Xarelto with those of patients using warfarin. The concern is that the faulty results may have led doctors to give patients the wrong dose of warfarin, which could have favored Xarelto.
Last month the Duke researchers published an analysis in The New England Journal of Medicine and concluded that the problems with the device did not change the trial’s results.
But some in the medical community questioned their findings because their method required them to essentially guess which groups of patients were more likely to be affected by the malfunctioning device.
A better way to evaluate the device, other researchers said, would be to compare the device readings with test results that were done at a central laboratory. Investigators did that at two points in the trial, drawing blood from more than 5,000 of the patients who took warfarin and sending the samples for testing. The blood was taken 12 and 24 weeks after patients enrolled in the trial.

But the Duke researchers made no mention of the lab data in their letter. In an interview, journal editors said they did not know about the lab data until last Tuesday, when a reporter for The New York Times asked them about it.
“At the time we published the letter, we didn’t know that it existed,” said Dr. Jeffrey M. Drazen, editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine.
Dr. Drazen disputed the lawyers’ claim that the editors had been misled about the data, and said it was not relevant to the letter that was published.
Last week, lawyers in the case against Johnson & Johnson and Bayer filed a legal brief in federal court in New Orleans, asking a judge to unseal documents in the case, which involves more than 5,000 lawsuits filed by patients and their families who claim they were harmed by Xarelto. Of those, 500 involve patient deaths.
In a footnote, the lawyers said that during the process of vetting the Duke researchers’ letter, a peer reviewer asked about the existence of lab data that would allow a comparison with the device’s readings.
“Despite being provided this opportunity to respond to the peer reviewers,” the lawyers said, the “defendants remained silent on this point, thereby misleading the NEJM.”
Dr. Drazen confirmed that a peer reviewer, whose identities are kept confidential, had asked about such data, but said the editors had rephrased the question to ask whether such data was available throughout the course of the trial. Duke then answered no, he said.
The letter’s three authors, two from Duke and one affiliated with the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, declined to comment, as did a spokesman for Duke.
Dr. Drazen questioned the value of comparing lab results taken at only two points during the trial, noting that people’s blood-clotting levels can vary greatly over time. “There’s so much variation among people that it probably wouldn’t be clinically informative,” he said.
However, he said, the Duke researchers had since agreed to conduct an analysis of the lab data.
Dr. Drazen also said that the editors had not been in contact with either Johnson & Johnson or Bayer. A spokeswoman for Johnson & Johnson said the analysis by Duke was conducted independently of the company. Although a company employee serves on the trial’s executive committee, she said he recused himself “from the conduct of the reanalysis, the drafting of the research letter, and provided no feedback before it was submitted.” Bayer declined to comment.
In a previous statement, Duke said it had conducted its research separately from the two companies. But this fall, Bayer submitted an analysis to the European Medicines Agency that was nearly identical to the approach used by the Duke researchers, comparing the outcomes of patients who had specific medical conditions with outcomes of those who did not. And the legal document filed last week cites a document obtained from one of the companies that describes the peer-review process.

Some experts say this case is reminiscent of other instances in which drug companies concealed or altered drug-trial data in medical journals. In 2005, for example, The New England Journal of Medicine published a rare Expression of Concern after it learned that researchers had failed to include three heart attacks in a study of the painkiller Vioxx, made by Merck, which has since been withdrawn from the market. In that case, editors learned that data had been deleted from the trial manuscript two days before it was submitted to the journal.
Such controversies led to changes in the way that journal articles are published. Authors are now required to disclose their outside financial interests and the role that drug companies played in articles’ publication.
Several researchers said they were surprised that Duke and the editors at the journal did not see value in comparing the lab data, especially since Bayer and Johnson & Johnson have submitted such information to regulators in Europe and the United States.
“I think it’s always important to make sure that you have all the information to answer the scientific question before publication,” said Dr. Rita F. Redberg, a cardiologist who is also editor of the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
Less than a week after the Duke letter was published, the European Medicines Agency released its own report, which contained analyses using the independent lab comparisons. The agency concluded the device most likely did not affect the trial’s outcome, but it did find that the device was highly inaccurate.

Dr. Steven Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, served on the Food and Drug Administration advisory panel that voted to approve Xarelto in 2011. He was one of two members who voted against the drug. He expressed doubt that any after-the-fact analysis would give doctors and patients answers. “Given the fact that the device was inaccurate, there is no way anybody can tell you what would have happened in the trial,” he said.