TORONTO (AP) - Canadian drug firm Biovail Corp. is paying as much as $1,000 each to U.S. doctors who prescribe the company's new heart medication as part of a survey.
The practice, which company officials acknowledged Monday, has raised ethical concerns about combining sales and marketing efforts with genuine research.
Biovail spokesman Kenneth Howling said that although the payments are the company's first, they are standard practice in the industry. He said Biovail considered the compensation for the extra work doctors perform responding to the survey, which involves the new drug Cardizem LA.
But according to The Wall Street Journal, which reported on the payments Monday, some doctors see the incentives as a campaign to promote the drug, and note that the $1,000 maximum payment is one of the highest ever offered.
Biovail has targeted about 25,000 doctors for the survey, but expects fewer than a fifth of those to participate, said Howling, the company's vice president for finance. He said paying doctors would not affect their medical judgment.
"I think an incentive of approximately $50 per patient is not going to influence a doctor from prescribing what they feel is an appropriate treatment," he said.
The pharmaceutical firm is also paying doctors' staff as much as $150 for completing surveys. The payments are incremental, with the $1,000 given to doctors who prescribe the drug for at least 11 patients.
"The purpose is to generate important research information regarding how Cardizem LA performs, what risk factors may be associated with it, and how it affects patient subgroups," Howling said.
Cardizem LA is a new hypertension drug Biovail says is an improvement on Cardizem CD, which is also produced as a cheaper generic drug. Howling said Cardizem LA is formulated to offer better protection against a morning rise in blood pressure.
A spokeswoman for the American Heart Association said its representatives couldn't comment on the ethics of the strategy without closely examining the survey. Money for the campaign, which is being run by Quintiles Transnational Corp. of Durham, N.C., comes out of Biovail's marketing budget.
Headquartered in Mississauga, Ontario, near Toronto, Biovail has operations in the U.S., Canada and Ireland. It had 2002 revenue of $788 million. Biovail's shares closed at $39.17 Monday on the New York Stock Exchange, down 4.6 percent.
