Pharmaceutical firms provide hundreds of billions of yen each year in donations and other forms of payments to medical researchers. They play a key role in studies by the researchers on the effects of the drugs sold by them and use the data to advertise their products as more effective than those marketed by rival firms. Such ties of mutual dependency between drugmakers and researchers at university hospitals have been highlighted by the problems over clinical studies on drugs marketed by Novartis Pharma K.K.
The Japanese sales arm of the Swiss-based pharmaceutical giant Novartis is suspected of engaging in exaggerated advertising, using research papers based on falsified data on the effects of a popular drug to lower blood pressure. Based on a criminal accusation filed by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry, the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor's Office has been interrogating people at Novartis Pharma and at five university hospitals involved in clinical research on the drug.
Suspicions have also surfaced that Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., Japan's largest drugmaker, used inappropriate data for advertising the effects of its own blood pressure-lowering medicine, and a third-party investigation by a law office is now looking into the case.