Brooklyn Law School Lecture
Secrets of Vioxx: Drug Safety and the Drug Development Process

Thursday, April 10, 2008
4:00–5:30 pm
Reception to follow
Subotnick Center

Download and print the flyer. (PDF)

In 1999 the Food and Drug Administration approved as safe and effective the anti-inflammatory drug Rofecoxib developed by Merck & Co, and then marketed under the brand name Vioxx. Five years later, in September 2004, Merck voluntarily withdrew the drug from the market because of concerns about increased risk of heart attack and stroke associated with long-term high-dosage use. In the year before Vioxx was pulled from the market, its sales revenue in the U.S. topped $2.5 billion. This talk will review materials produced in litigation in New Jersey with a specific focus on adverse events associated with the drug.

About the Speaker
David Madigan is Professor of Statistics at Columbia University. He has previously worked for AT&T Inc., Soliloquy Inc., the University of Washington, Rutgers University, and SmartForce, Inc. He has over 100 publications in such areas as Bayesian statistics, text mining, Monte Carlo methods, and probabilistic graphical models. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He is the current Editor-in-Chief of Statistical Science.

Read about past programs.