Troubled reports

Indian scientist Raghunath Mashelkar, former head of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, has resigned as the chairman of a government panel on patent laws after charges that some parts of a recent report had been plagiarized. Non-governmental organizations, local pharmaceutical companies and some scientists had alleged that the panel allowed companies to monopolize drugs by letting them patent minor modifications to existing drugs. Critics revealed that key recommendations in the report had been lifted verbatim from an earlier study sponsored by US and European drug firms. Mashelkar had offered to correct the “inadvertent error” and resubmit the report, but critics want the entire report to be scrapped.

Testing times

Two researchers who left the US government in the wake of Congressional hearings in 2002 on their work with private companies have founded a new firm to specialize in personalized medicine. Lance Liotta and Emanuel Petricoin say that their new company, Theranostics Health of Rockville, Maryland, will sell protein profiling tests that predict how patients' cancers will respond to treatments. The pair had previously developed a protein profiling test to detect ovarian cancer, but the test's accuracy was questioned by other scientists (see Nature 429, 496; 2004).

Not so clean

Torcetrapib, a drug abruptly dropped from clinical trials last December over safety concerns, might not be able to unclog arteries after all, according to studies reported last week at the American College of Cardiology meeting in New Orleans. Some of the studies have also been published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Pfizer had hoped that its drug would raise high-density lipoprotein, or 'good' cholesterol, enough to clear out arteries. The new findings suggest that good cholesterol does rise significantly, but has little effect on cleaning out arteries, leaving experts to wonder whether similar drugs under development will work. A much larger study whose expected release at the meeting was delayed (see Nature 446, 363; doi:10.1038/446363a 2007) may answer that question.