Avandia and the Revenge of the Brain Dead Kangaroos

We're not ones to call advisory committee members names. We'll let them do that to themselves.

"I was one of the brain-dead kangaroos last time who was on the fence, largely because I did see a signal for harm that was outweighed at that time by the comparison to active comparators, which I think is much more relevant to me than placebo, and I wasn't swayed by the pioglitazone data that was presented at that time because it was pretty preliminary," Morris Schambelan, San Francisco General Hospital, said in explaining why he had voted to recommend removing GlaxoSmithKline's Avandia from the market at the July 13-14 meeting of the Endocrinologic and Metabolic Drugs and Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committees, after having voted that it should stay on the market in July 2007. He was in the minority this time, however; the committees voted 20-12 that the drug should stay on the market.

Read more about the revenge of the brain-dead kangaroos in this week's "Pink Sheet" ...

-- Martin Berman-Gorvine