Vladimir Martin called himself 'doctor' and ran 17 clinical trials of new drugs for major pharmaceutical companies before one patient noticed he didn't have a medical license.
The patient alerted the St. Petersburg Times, whose resulting story led to a state investigation. On Saturday, Martin, 43, was arrested on charges of practicing medicine without a license. He was later released from the Pinellas County Jail on $10,000 bail. The felony charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and maximum fine of $5,000.
The Clearwater man, who changed his last name from Kossatchev after moving to Florida in 2003, went to medical school in the former Soviet Union and practiced in a hospital in his native Ukraine.
Ruth Weber, a 74-year-old Clearwater resident, told the Times in April 2008 that the man who called himself Dr. Martin enrolled her in a study for lower-back pain and adjusted the dosage of her medicine. Only licensed physicians are supposed to conduct such activities. Patients in the study were randomly selected to receive a new Johnson & Johnson painkiller called tapentadol, a placebo or the potent narcotic oxycodone.
Though Dr. Robert Lee Jackson, a Clearwater osteopath, was listed by the FDA as the physician conducting the study, Weber said she never saw Jackson. In weekly visits to Alliance Medical Research Group on Belcher Road, Weber said it was Martin who drew blood, doled out medication and, at one point, doubled her dosage.
Martin also conducted electrocardiograms on Weber, although his techniques were so rusty the electrodes kept slipping off, she said. Weber eventually dropped out of the study when she saw no improvement for her back pain.
A second woman, Ann Reed, told investigators she also responded to an ad for a drug study trial at Alliance Medical Research. Martin took her blood, listened to her heart and gave her medications, Reed said. Martin sometimes had to stick her four times to draw blood, she said.
Like Weber, Reed said she never saw Jackson during her trial, which involved 13 visits between May 2007 and March 2008.
Greg Panico, a spokesman for Johnson & Johnson, said the company audited Alliance Medical after the Times' story and submitted its findings to the FDA. He declined to discuss the nature of the report, but said the drug company is no longer working with Alliance Medical.
Panico also said data collected in the tapentadol study at that site was not submitted to the FDA.
The drugmaker said it reported its findings to the Sterling Institutional Review Board in Atlanta, which had been hired by Johnson & Johnson to oversee patient safety during the trial.
Despite losing the Johnson & Johnson trial, Martin told investigators in July that he was conducting four other drug studies.
A little Google searching turned up another example on ClinicalTrials.gov of a commercially funded clinical study for which the Alliance Medical Research Group enrolled patients. This was a Phase III study sponsored by Cephalon, an "Open-Label Study to Evaluate the Effect of Treatment With Fentanyl Buccal Tablets on Pain Anxiety Symptoms When Used for the Management of Breakthrough Pain." Note also that Sterling Institutional Review Board appears to be another example of a for-profit, commercial institutional review board.
Here we have another example of remarkably bad implementation of commercially sponsored and commercially supervised clinical trials.
We have posted a number of times about sloppy and mismanagement of commercially sponsored clinical research, often under the auspices of for-profit contract research organizations (CROs) and for-profit institutional review boards (IRBs). See this 2006 vintage post on the infamous study 3014 on Ketek, sponsored by Sanofi Aventis.
In my humble opinion, in the contemporary business world, many managers are driven mainly by quarterly profits. However, what works best to boost profits in the short run may not be what works to produce valid clinical research that maximizes the safety of and respect afforded human research subjects. When all the organizations involved in the research, the sponsor, the organization implementing the research, and the organization supervising research ethics are for-profit, the incentives to cut corners are multiplied. Cutting corners can jeopardize the validity of the studies, and the safety and respectful treatment of study subjects.
I again submit that making human experimental research into a commercial enterprise, mainly serving the marketing of drugs and devices, may not produce good science, and may not be good for patients. It might be a better idea to leave human research to not-for-profit organizations and health care professionals.
Hat tip to PharmaGossip.