Word: celebrex
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Becky Long, 63, of Tampa, Fla., has been taking the prescription drug Celebrex for her arthritis for the past two years. So when she heard the news last week that the drug, along with another painkiller called Vioxx, might be associated with an increased risk of heart attack, she called her doctor right away. Her biggest concern was not what you might expect, however. "The first thing I thought of was that Celebrex gave me my life back," says Long, who used to find climbing stairs impossible but has since felt well enough to travel to Nepal. "What would...
Long is not the only one asking questions. Patients with a variety of concerns have been flooding physicians' phone lines with inquiries about Celebrex and Vioxx, two examples of a heavily advertised new class of analgesics called COX-2 inhibitors that are supposed to be easier on the stomach than aspirin. Some folks wanted to discontinue their medication; others just needed to hear that the potential cardiac threat was only theoretical and not proved...
Even in this gilded era of unsurpassed profit for biotech and pharmaceutical conglomerates, one company always struck analysts as something of a black sheep. The Monsanto Company, whose subsidiary Searle makes the wildly successful arthritis drug Celebrex, has been casting around for a merger partner for over a year, and now, executives say, the search is over. Monsanto will merge with Pharmacia & Upjohn, joining the ranks of other mega-merger firms like Astra-Zeneca and Rhone-Poulenc-Hoechst, to form a corporation worth about $52 billion. Why did it take so long for Monsanto to find its mate...
...example, soon after the new arthritis drug Celebrex became available, the Food and Drug Administration received 53 reports of dispensing errors that occurred when it was mistaken for the seizure drug Cerebyx or the antidepressant Celexa. Searle, the maker of Celebrex, ran ads in medical journals this summer to point out the similarities to doctors and pharmacists and make them aware of the dangers of mixing them up. Although the FDA regulates drugs for safety and efficacy, it does not pay as close attention to their names...
...some new drugs are generating a lot of medical buzz, including a special session at the recent meeting of the American College of Rheumatology in Boston and several reports in last week's Journal of the American Medical Association. In one study, researchers compared Celebrex, one of the so-called COX-II inhibitors (they attack an enzyme, COX-II, that promotes inflammation) to naproxen, a commonly used NSAID. Both reduced the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. But while 26% of the naproxen patients got an ulcer in either the stomach or the small intestine, ulcers struck only...