Gone Shopping -- for a new drug

The big drug news on the financial pages yesterday was AstraZeneca's $1 billion deal to buy Artherogenics, an Atlanta-based start-up company with a new heart drug. The business pages cut this story as a play by a foundering AZ to get something promising into its impoverished new drug pipeline.

Evidence that Artherogenics new drug works -- it's a heart attack preventive measure that many will take on top of taking cholesterol-lowering drugs -- merits close scrutiny. A little over a year ago, Dr. Eric Topol accused the company of fudging the data on its clinical trials. "The company has fully manipulated the reanalysis that was performed at our center, not having presented the planned, original, primary analysis and has thus shirked its responsibility to report the truth," he wrote. You can read his full article here.