Prasugrel Backlash Doesn't Deter Kaul

Sanjay Kaul doesn’t get discouraged easily.

The very public debacle over Kaul’s potential intellectual conflict of interest with Lilly/Daiichi Sankyo’s anti-clotting agent prasugrel has not deterred the cardiologist from fulfilling his obligation as a member of the Cardiovascular-Renal Drugs Advisory Committee.

According to information posted on FDA website, Kaul will participate in the committee review of Sanofi-Aventis’ antiarrhythmic dronedarone (Multaq). Dronedarone will be his first meeting as a permanent member of the Cardio-Renal advisory committee after being “disinvited” from the February 3 prasugrel panel due to a potential intellectual bias.

At the time, Office of New Drugs director John Jenkins expressed hope that Kaul, a well-known cardiologist at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, would remain a member of the advisory committee, despite that fact that his disinvitation sparked a very public—and at times nasty—post-meeting debate over the integrity of FDA’s advisory committee process. (We’ll have more on that in the next issue of The RPM Report.)

“Dr. Kaul is a new standing member of the Cardio-Renal advisory committee. This would have been his first meeting as a standing member,” Jenkins said in a post-prasugrel interview. “We hope that he will continue to serve and will be a productive member of the committee going forward.”

Jenkins was careful to clarify that Kaul was not to blame for the incident. “He did everything he was supposed to do,” he said. “There’s been some suggestion out there—and maybe it’s even from the FDA press statement—that in some way he did not provide us with the information. That’s not correct.”

“He submitted all the paperwork that was required to be on the committee and to be screened for the committee. And when questions were raised about the abstracts, he responded very promptly.”

Kaul is also expected to participate in the second day of the meeting, which will consider the approvability of Johnson & Johnson’s novel factor Xa rivaroxaban (Xarelto) for use in prophylaxis of deep vein thrombosis. Like prasugrel, rivaroxaban is an antithrombotic, and like prasugrel, it may unseat the standard of care, in this case warfarin/heparinoid therapy.

And if all that isn’t enough reason to tune in this week, here’s one more. Pharmaceutical industry critic and Public Citizen Health Research Group director Sidney Wolfe will be at the conference table, representing the Drug Safety & Risk Management Advisory Committee.