(Updated)
Novartis will no longer sponsor a contest designed to support the publication of peer review articles about Entresto, the company’s important new heart failure drug.
The contest is taking place on Cureus, an open access journal, publishing platform, and vehicle for industry-sponsored content. The contest offered $10,000 in rewards for articles supporting a recent update to heart failure guidelines that endorsed the use of Entresto. The competition “seeks to develop” case reports and original articles about the new updated guideline.
As reported here last week, the competition began to fall apart as soon as questions about it were raised. Members of a distinguished “peer review panel” of cardiologists removed themselves from the panel as soon as these questions were raised.
The company said today that it would no longer provide financial support for the contest. Here is the company’s statement:
“Heart failure is a major public health issue and despite the recent update of clinical guidelines, the condition remains uncontrolled for a large percentage of patients. We believe that it’s important for the medical community to share their experiences with each other and demonstrate how they are practicing medicine in this evolving area. This program was designed to facilitate the exchange of scientific and clinical information about how the medical community is applying the new guideline update for the treatment of heart failure with reduced ejection fraction. However, Novartis has made the decision to end our support of the program because we are no longer confident that it will meet our goals of scientific exchange among healthcare providers. We remain committed to supporting independent medical education.”
Update, 3:50 PM:
The webpage for the contest now states that the competition has been suspended. Here is the text of the statement:
“This competition has been suspended.
Heart failure is a major public health issue and despite the recent update of clinical guidelines, the condition remains uncontrolled for a large percentage of patients.
Through this program we hoped to independently document scientific and clinical experiences focused on how the medical community is applying the new HFrEF guideline update. As an open-access educational program, we also hoped to share those results (positive or negative) with the global community to ultimately further medical knowledge and improve the lives of patients.
However, we no longer believe that we will be able to meet the objectives for this specific program, and are therefore suspending the call for articles.
Cureus remains committed to independent, open-access medical publishing and education. No submissions fees. No copyright paywalls. Ever.
We appreciate your continued support.”
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What to say but thaks Larry Husten ! Obviously Dr. M. Packer was right been critical of the competition and sure his concepts had influence on the change of opinion of the “peer review panel”.
Someone, somewhere, gets paid to write the kinds of press statements cited in this article.
Then, they go home to their families and live otherwise blameless lives. Probably they sleep reasonably OK at night too. Maybe they even encourage their kids to study science.
I guess we all have to eat.
Why didn’t they just market sacubitril to be taken along with the cheap generically available valsartan?? Oh, they need to be formulated together or else it wont work properly LOL!
This trial comparing and ARB to an ACE inhibitor is ridiculous, It’s something people have known about for years. ACE inhibitors are known to be troublesome for COPD sufferers, the infamous coversyl cough proves that, is Novartis doing nothing more than capitalizing on the benefits of switching from and ACE inhibitor to an ARB for those with COPD and CHF?? Take a look at the dosing in the so called head to head comparison of valsartan vs valsartan/sacubitril, the whole trial was obviously rigged.
People really wonder why drug costs are so high, they are paying a fortune for valsartan again when it’s now being made for next to nothing since it’s patent protection loss as Diovan.
What is the most astounding thing about all this is how few doctors are able to understand these facts, yet they blindly prescribe such unnecessarily expensive meds based upon marketing.
Where is the simple trial where the FDA trumpets the benefits of switching from an ACE inhibitor to an ARB for certain populations using cheap generic alternatives?
When are we going to demand that the FDA stop being used by pharmaceutical companies as a way of boosting stock prices through everything from what we see with entresto, to small pump and dump startups broadcasting their early stage clinical trial “successes”.
Why doesn’t the FDA distribute information telling people that they can basically buy their way into the clinical trial process as long as they can come up with a compound that doesn’t kill all the rats?