Physician Pleads Guilty to Fraud for Fabricating Celebrex (and Other) Study Data

As reported by the Springfield, MA, Republican:

A former chief of acute pain at Baystate Medical Center has agreed to plead guilty to falsifying medical research and must pay $420,000 in restitution to pharmaceutical companies, federal court records show.

Dr. Scott S. Reuben, of Longmeadow, was charged on Thursday with health care fraud. He signed a plea agreement with prosecutors a week earlier.

Reuben prompted a furor in the medical community in March, when he was accused of making up research results in at least 21 published studies and inventing patients in certain instances.

In one notable instance,

In 2005, Reuben received a $74,000 research grant from pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, agreeing to test Celebrex as a component of the multimodal therapy. He claimed to have treated 200 patients, 100 with Pfizer's product and 100 with a placebo.

'In fact, Reuben had not enrolled any patients into that study and the results reported both to Pfizer and to the Anesthesia and Analgesia Journal and in turn to the public were wholly made up by Reuben,' the charge states.

Albert said the fabrications were discovered by medical staff within the hospital during a routine review at the hospital's 'research week,' when clinicians design poster displays of their studies.

A report in the New London, CT, Day indicated the scope of Reuben's fake research:

Anesthesia & Analgesia later had to retract 10 papers authored by Reuben, and medical experts at the time said at least 21 journal articles by the anesthesiologist appeared to have been fabricated.

The agreement calls for Reuben to pay restitution of $296,557 to Pfizer and $16,000 to Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, two companies that merged last fall. Merck & Co. would receive $49,375 from the agreement, according to documents.

In addition to his fabricated Celebrex studies, Reuben had pretended to do research that backed the effectiveness of other pain drugs, including Pfizer's Bextra and Merck's Vioxx, according to prosecutors. Bextra and Vioxx later were pulled from the market because studies showed they increased the risk of death from heart attacks and strokes.

In addition, Reuben published data showing that Pfizer's antidepressant Effexor had exhibited painkilling properties.

Reuben's studies had been considered pioneering at the time they were published. His data had supported the use of two of Pfizer's major products - Celebrex and Lyrica - in combination to treat certain types of post-operative pain.

Reuben 'was a regular on the medical lecturing circuit,' according to court documents, and 'had become a well known figure in the anesthesia and pain management medical communities.'

Pfizer said previously that it had supported five of Reuben's research initiatives. Pfizer, which declined at the time to reveal how much it paid Reuben over the years to be part of its speakers' bureau, said the company played no part in the fraud.

Asked for a comment Friday, Pfizer was not able to provide a timely response.

Note that we usually do not post about stories of individual's clinical research misconduct, not because it is unimportant, but because individual misconduct may be related more to an individual's motives and character than to concentration and abuse of power in health care.

However, in this case it appears that Dr Reubens was enabled, at least in the psychological and logistical senses, by pharmaceutical companies happy to sponsor research which suggested the effectiveness of their products.  Since Dr Reubens apparently fabricated most of his data, notice that he apparently deliberately fabricated data that made Pfizer's Celebrex, Bextra, Lyrica, and Effexor, and Merck's Vioxx look good.  Perhaps there was careerism here.  Positive studies about "innovative" effective drugs are more likely to get published than negative studies or studies of old drugs.  However, we have noted before that pharmaceutical (and biotechnology and device) companies like to sponsor studies with results that make their products look good. 

One bit of good news in this story is that Reuben's colleagues at the hospital apparently were able to uncover the fabrications when they had an opportunity to critically look at data from several of his studies.

Certainly some Pfizer employees had easy access to the same data.  But perhaps they would not have thought to look at it critically as long as it was so unrelentingly positive about their company's products. 

As we have said before, health care professionals, policy makers and patients ought to be extremely skeptical of clinical studies sponsored (and often deeply influenced) by those with vested interests in the studies' turning out in certain ways.  We ought to reconsider national research policies that have turned over sponsorship of the majority of clinical research to those with such vested interests.

Hat tip to Prof Margaret Soltan on the University Diaries blog.

ADDENDUM (19 January, 2010) - see also comments on the Alison Bass Blog.