RxISK Seeks Reports from AbbVie Customers

Are you taking any AbbVie drugs? David Healy & team want a report from you at RxISK.org

Toronto, Ontario — July 15, 2013 – RxISK.org, the first free independent website for researching and reporting prescription drug side effects, is helping a campaign to capture patient reported side effects of a range of drugs sold by the pharmaceutical company AbbVie (NYSE:ABBV) – the recent spun-off entity of Abbott Laboratories.

The campaign was announced by Dr. David Healy, a leading drug safety advocate and psychopharmacologist, in his recent blog post on DavidHealy.org.

As reported in the PharmaTimes, AbbVie and InterMune sued the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to prevent the release of data and obtained an interim injunction to prevent the release. Bloomberg reports that this interim decision is being appealed by EMA.

“Since most drugs are marketed and used globally this data could have global significance,” says Dr. Healy. Healy is among the growing group of high profile advocates for access to complete data.

(Interim decision see C-389/13 P, EMA v. AbbVie, C-390/13 P, EMA v. InterMune U.K. and Others.)

Dr. Healy says, “Data transparency would be an important first step in helping patients and their doctors make informed decisions on the benefits and risks of prescription medicines by enabling independent validation. We urge everyone to make their voices heard on this issue”.

“Side effects know no borders and in this campaign we want to use RxISK.org to collect patient reports about AbbVie drugs from every corner of the planet. We will share these results with everyone – including AbbVie”, says Healy.

AbbVie drugs include:

• Humira
• Depakote (another AbbVie drug, for which the company was fined $1.3 Billion for mismarketing).
• Kaletra (for HIV/AIDs)
• Androgel (for low Testosterone)
• Lupron (for prostate cancer, breast cancer and endometriosis)
• Esbriet

RxISK — your megaphone to help change drug safety

RxISK.org allows users to enter the name of a prescription drug and see the side effects that have been reported to the FDA since 2004, as well as to RxISK, for more than 35,000 drug names from 103 countries. The data is presented in tables, tag clouds, heat maps, and interactive graphs, showing what’s happening with other people taking the same drug around the world.

Users can then select the effect(s) they are experiencing and click on Report a Drug Side Effect to complete a report. They get a personalized RxISK Report linking their symptoms and meds, which they can take to their doctor or pharmacist to facilitate a better treatment conversation. This will also add their anonymized experience to the RxISK database so that others can benefit from this information.

About Data Based Medicine Americas Ltd.

RxISK.org is owned and operated by Data Based Medicine Americas Ltd. (DBM), based in Toronto, Canada. DBM’s founders have international reputations in early drug-side-effect detection and risk mitigation, pharmacovigilance, and patient-centered care. Although drug side effects are known to be a leading cause of death and disability, less than 5% of serious drug side effects are reported. DBM’s mission is to capture this missing data directly from patients through RxISK’s free drug side effect reporting tool and use this data to help make medicines safer for all of us.