E-drug: Optimal dosing strategy for statins
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On Ciprian Jauca's posting on "Statin's benefit for secondary
prevention confirmed: What is the optimal dosing strategy?," there is
an ongoing megatrial, called SEARCH, currently run by the Clinical
Trial Service and Epidemiological Studies Unit of the University of
Oxford, one of the largest clinical trials units in the world. The unit is
publicly funded by the Medical Research Council, the British Heart
Foundation and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now merged
with other cancer charities). The drug trials are partly sponsored by
the industry, mainly in the way of drug donations. However, as
simvastatin is now off patent in most countries I guess Merck is not
going to make a huge amount of money from it due to generic
competition.
All the CTSU employees (as I was for two years) have to sign a
legally binding statement, together with their contract, that they will
not accept any moneys from any drug company, including speaker's
fees at medical conferences. They can only accept refunds for
attending conferences in limited amounts. SEARCH is a two by two
factorial design trial comparing folate 5 mg/matching placebo plus
simvastatin 80 mg/matching placebo in secondary CV prevention. It is
a sort of follow-on study after the 20,000 subjects Heart Protection
Study initially published Lancet May 2002.
Valeria
Dr Valeria Frighi
Oxford Centre for diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism
Churchill Hospital
Oxford UK
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