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Comment by NTripleOne | Hacker News Reader

I mean, it's literally in the article that pfizer had to pay for the study, so it wasn't exactly impartial from the start.

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Pharmaceutical manufacturers are always required to perform safety studies on their drugs in the US. There's nothing unusual about this.

There's no prescription drug you can take here that is actually tested by the FDA. They work with the manufacturers to ensure the testing is thorough and accurate, but the company's themselves fund and conduct the testing.

http://www.fda.gov/drugs/resourcesforyou/consumers/ucm143534...

"Q: Does FDA test drugs?

A: No. It is the responsibility of the company seeking approval to market a drug to conduct laboratory and animal tests on the safety and effectiveness of a proposed new drug and then to submit that information to FDA for review by CDER physicians, statisticians, chemists, pharmacologists, and other scientist."

http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/ResourcesForYou/SpecialFeatures/ucm...

It's not unusual, but it's still a massive conflict of interest. The drug companies are clearly incentivized to hire laboratories that just happen to come up with the "right" results. Alternatively, they can just hire a hundred studies and just use the one that happens, by chance, to turn out the way they want.

But that's not how drug trials in the US are conducted. Drug companies work with the FDA from the start to get a drug through phase-1 and phase-2 trials.

There's just simply no opportunity to test out a drug in 100 different studies with 100 different groups of people and cherry pick the study you want to submit to the FDA. The process doesn't work like that.

That's how the FDA works.

The FDA is required to approve the study plan, the pharma (or really, the contract research organization (CRO) acting on its behalf) reports back to the FDA. The FDA decides based on the reported study result (reported to the FDA) whether the drug can be marketed and under what constraints.

Why should tax payer pick up the tab on a clinical trial like this? Over the life time of a modern drug, the clinical trials required can easily approach $1B.

And this is a one reason why our medical costs are so high.

I was in Florida visiting family over the weekend and this exact study was mentioned by the local news with a series of interviews. It was completely obvious that it was a commercial and nothing more.

One of the key things that tipped me off was that they compared "prescription strength" Ibuprofen to Celebrex once, then didn't mention it again. I get that it is like for like (prescription for prescription), but the vast majority of people taking Ibuprofen are not taking prescription strength dosages.

This should not be "news" it should be given to doctors to consider. We probably need a medical body to review these types of papers to determine whether they are actionable by medical professionals.

A prescription strength dose is only 3 normal ibuprofen tablets. That is an extremely common dose for people to take on their own with OTC ibuprofen, but it is also prescribed by a doctor in a single pill for convenience and to make it easier for insurance to cover it.

The point of the study is to compare long-term, daily use of NSAIDs. It isn't saying that you should take Celebrex for a headache (nor could you as it requires a prescription).

You shouldn't be so quick to dismiss a study that you think is "obviously a commercial" if you aren't familiar with the subject matter at hand.

You do realize that Celebrex is generic now and Pfizer has lost almost all of it's market share? If they promote Celebrex, they have little to gain from it.

The fact they were forced to pay for the study does not imply they had any saying on how it was conducted.

Perhaps, but it does suggest they had influence to make the authors not publish if the results didn't go there way. There's so many ways to distort information.

I'm not saying this study is bad, but studies paid for by corporations for their own gains should be the last we see running through news headlines. But of course, that is partly the effect they'd want from them...

The FDA mandated that this study be conducted. There was no chance of Pfizer sweeping the results under the rug, as the FDA was watching the whole process.

that's not how it works.

if you don't toe the line with the result of your study, that'll be the last one you do for the entire industry.

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