Peter Wilmshurst

Peter Wilmshurst is a British medical doctor and successful whistleblower who has been the subject of multiple cases of harassment through vexatious libel actions brought by companies whose products he criticised as ineffective. He has also reported at least twenty doctors to the General Medical Council in the course of two decades of investigating research misconduct.

In 1986, Wilmshurst, a cardiologist then working at St. Thomas' Hospital, London, approached The Guardian newspaper with a substantial dossier detailing alleged misconduct in the development of Amrinone, a cardiac drug manufactured by Sterling-Winthrop. The drug was supported by a study at Harvard Medical School and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, whose lead author was Eugene Braunwald, a leader in his field. Wilmshurst's group ran a series of experiments on the promising new drug but found no effect on contractility and frequent life-threatening side effects. Wilmshurst reported these findings to Sterling-Winthrop, who asked him to suppress the data. He refused, and they retaliated by threatening litigation. He continued the research and published his adverse findings in abstracts and conference presentations, until Sterling-Winthrop staff removed all stocks of the drug from the hospital pharmacy. A review by the Netherlands Committee for the Evaluation of Medicine found substantial discrepancies between the record cards of Wilmshurst's group and those submitted by Sterling-Winthrop. Wilmshurst showed that they had falsified the records, suppressing the adverse events he had reported. He then contacted the UK's Committee for the Safety of Medicines and discovered that Sterling-Winthrop had also failed to report the adverse events to the UK; they had also threatened the UK Government with closure of a large manufacturing plant in the UK. Sterling-Winthrop subsequently reported over 1,400 adverse events to the US Federal Food and Drug Administration, and terminated research and marketing in the US, while continuing to market the drug in the developing world. Finally, after a substantial Guardian feature, they withdrew the oral drug entirely in 1986. In 2003 he was given the Health Watch Award for this work.

...
Wikipedia