Glaxo and Avandia
GlaxoSmithKline Wednesday May 30th made a move to reaffirm the safety of its troubled diabetes drug Avandia in a letter to the Lancet medical journal, reviving the group's stock price nearly 2 percent. Merrill Lynch analysts earlier on Wednesday downgraded Glaxo to "sell" from "neutral", predicting no near-term growth for Avandia and a possible decline in sales, sending the shares to a two-year low. Its medical director, Ronald Krall, said data from long-term, large-scale trials showed the overall ischemic cardiovascular safety profile, including cardiovascular death, among diabetes patients treated with Avandia was comparable to patients treated with two other widely used diabetes medicines. Krall, further pointed out the actual number of heart attacks in this meta-analysis represented a very low frequency of events, just 0.6 percent for both the Avandia and the control group. There were 86 cases among 14,371 patients in the Avandia arm and 72 out of 11,634 in the control group. Glaxo said at the time it strongly disagreed with the findings of top U.S. cardiologist Steven Nissen but industry analysts said many doctors were likely to shun Avandia in favor of alternative treatments, pending further clinical evidence. The Lancet is not an insignificant journal ... this settles the nerves a bit if you are a Glaxo shareholder," said Navid Malik, an industry analyst with stockbroker Collins Stewart. The stock ended a see-saw day up up 1.7 percen, following news of the Lancet letter, though that is still a loss of more than 9 percent since Nissen dropped his bombshell.
