ASTRAZENECA CONSIDERS RESPONSE TO UK BODY ON ETHICS CODE BREACH
AstraZeneca said on Tuesday that it is considering how to respond to a ruling by a British regulatory panel that found the drug maker failed to accurately reflect side-effects of its key antipsychotic medicine Seroquel in an advertisement to doctors, Dow Jones reports.
A preliminary ruling by the Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority, or PMCPA, found that AstraZeneca breached three points of the British pharma industry's code of practice with a marketing claim that Seroquel had "a favourable weight profile across the full dose range" compared with similar drugs.
The advert appeared in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2004. The PMCPA did not say what the three points are.
A spokesman for the drug maker said, "the intended audience for the advertisement was UK healthcare professionals, including UK specialist psychiatrists who we believe would have understood the statement in the broader context of the debate around weight gain and atypical antipsychotics in the UK."