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The "tariff" of Sandoz whistleblowers. Luxury travel, but also jeans and sweatshirts

Travel, money, clothes and items to doctors. A 'tariff' to promote one's own medicines

The pharmaceutical company Sandoz 'rewarded' doctors from all over Italy for increasing the doses of Omnitrope, a growth hormone, with stays in luxury hotels between Montecarlo and Kyoto, designer jeans, computers or sums of money. Higher depending on the number of patients and doses prescribed

ROME - The doses of medicines were inflated 1, also prescribed to children, to increase the sales of certain drugs and receive rewards in return. Travel, money, objects, clothes. The Sandoz pharmaceutical company did things in an orderly fashion. And it had a kind of 'scale' to reward doctors who put patients on Omnitrope, a biosimilar growth hormone.

According to what they have revealed the investigations of the Nas of Bologna 2, a Sandoz pharmaceutical informant, for example, paid a doctor in the Endocrinology department of the San Matteo polyclinic in Pavia 30,000 euros to "reward the inclusion of at least twenty patients in therapy with Omnitrope during 2009 and 2010". The sum was disbursed as a liberal contribution in favor of a non-profit organization of which the doctor is president. In 2008-2009, another informant gave a pediatrician in Rome and a colleague of hers in the Endocrinology and Metabolic Diseases department of the Gemelli university hospital an amount of "10,000 and 8,000 euros annually, respectively, as payment for the inclusion of some patients in therapy with Omnitrope (among other things in ways that differ from the provisions contained in the marketing authorization of the drug and through prescriptions with doses higher than the therapeutic needs).The money was formally paid as compensation for consultancy and lessons given to Sandoz's scientific informants never actually lent". In the telephone interceptions, the informants spoke of the pediatrician saying they were pleased because she gave "horse doses".

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Fedaiisf Federazione delle Associazioni Italiane degli Informatori Scientifici del Farmaco e del Parafarmaco