The PMCPA has turned party pooper, coming down on GSK after learning that a U.K. employee celebrated a post about a prescription drug on LinkedIn.
A panel of leaders at the PMCPA, pharma’s marketing self-regulatory body in the U.K., looked into the case after receiving a complaint from an anonymous person. The complainant, who called themselves a health professional, alerted the PMCPA to a LinkedIn post from an American medical institute.
The post hailed “promising results” from a trial of GSK’s PARP inhibitor niraparib in brain cancer patients; the drug, sold as Zejula, is currently approved as a maintenance treatment for advanced ovarian cancer, fallopian tube cancer and primary peritoneal cancer.
Since it originated in the U.S., the post was initially outside of the scope of the code enforced by the PMCPA. That changed when a U.K.-based GSK employee clicked “celebrate” on the post. Celebrating or otherwise reacting to a post shares the message with a user’s connections on the social media platform, making it a potential form of promotion in the PMCPA’s view.
GSK held its hands up when contacted about the case, admitting to breaches of three clauses of the PMCPA’s code while pushing back against the allegation that it had brought discredit on the industry. The company said that the employee’s action broke U.K. rules on promoting a drug for an unlicensed indication and advertising a prescription-only medicine to the public. The PMCPA panel agreed that GSK had broken those two clauses of the code.
GSK also pleaded guilty to the accusation that it breached the requirement that a medicine must not be promoted before the grant of its marketing authorization, but the panel reached a different conclusion. The fact that niraparib is approved in a different indication led the panel to rule no breach of that clause on a “technical point.”
Another point of disagreement landed in the opposite direction. The drugmaker pushed back against the accusation that it failed to maintain high standards. To GSK, the employee’s celebration of the post was an “isolated incident due to an error in judgement” that happened despite its robust social media policies and systems. The company also said the error was too insignificant to imply a failure to meet high standards.
The panel found no fault with GSK’s policies, noting that the company’s guidance says staff must not like content that mentions its prescription products or R&D assets. But the PMCPA reached a different conclusion on the severity of the error. The promotion of drugs to the public is a serious matter, the panel said, and as such high standards hadn’t been maintained.
GSK and the panel did agree, however, that the error didn’t discredit the industry.
GSK is the latest in a series of companies to receive a telling-off for LinkedIn likes. Though most of its peers typically end up with similar rulings to GSK’s, Sanofi recently bucked the trend by successfully defending itself against allegations that likes by U.K. employees broke the rule against advertising prescription drugs to the public.