Quoted from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-15/takeda-worried-about-actos-s-cancer-link-filing-shows.html
Takeda Worried About Actos’s Cancer Link, Filing Shows
By Jef Feeley & Margaret Cronin Fisk - Feb 15, 2013 12:16 PM ET
Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. executives were so worried in 2003 that their diabetes drug Actos might be linked to cancer that they questioned doctors on whether they would prescribe a drug that had a warning about the disease on its label, according to court filings.
Takeda, which faces more than 3,000 lawsuits over Actos, argues in court papers that the drug doesn’t cause bladder cancer. The company secretly surveyed a dozen doctors in 2003 to see if they would use a diabetes drug with their patients that carried a warning about the potentially fatal ailment, lawyers for a former Actos user said in the filing. Actos was once the company’s top-selling drug.
The survey found “a bladder cancer warning would destroy the sales of Takeda’s most important drug,” attorneys for ex- Actos user Jack Cooper said in the Jan. 25 filing. Jurors in Los Angeles, where Actos cases are consolidated in state court, are set to hear Cooper’s claims against the drugmaker starting Feb. 19 in the first case over the drug to go to trial.
The trial comes a month after Takeda won U.S. regulatory approval for Nesina, a new diabetes drug to replace Actos, which lost patent protection last year. Takeda, based in Osaka, Japan, is Asia’s biggest drugmaker.
Takeda officials counter that they acted properly to inform doctors about Actos’s health risks and emphasized patient safety in their handling of the diabetes drug.
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