Eli Lilly wins injunction in Zyprexa litigation

A senior judge of the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York, has granted Eli Lilly a permanent injunction against several individuals, who conspired with a journalist to leak confidential Lilly documents relating to the anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa, to The New York Times.

The documents were initially provided by Eli Lilly in the course of litigation against the company by some 30,000 plaintiffs over the past two and a half years who claim that inadequate warnings about Zyprexa led to obesity and diabetes.

In a detailed opinion nearly 80 pages long, Judge Jack Weinstein described how Dr Egilman, who was bound by a court order of confidentiality, provided confidential documents to Mr Gottstein, an Alaska attorney, who then passed them to a Times reporter. This was deemed a breach of the confidentiality order that covered all parties to the litigation. However the action has failed to stop the documents appearing on the worldwide web.

The documents allegedly show that Eli Lilly withheld information from doctors about Zyprexa's potential side effects.

Zyprexa was approved in 1996 and Lilly says the product information provided to physicians identified the potentially clinically-significant weight gain that was observed in more than half of all patients treated long-term with Zyprexa, as well as the cases of diabetes and elevated blood sugar observed in clinical trials.