By Peter Weiss
By the time pharmaceutical giant Merck yanked its painkiller Vioxx from the market last fall, the evidence had become overwhelming that the pills were nearly doubling patients’ chances of heart attacks or strokes.
What’s particularly disturbing is that the drug before its 1999 approval had passed the full battery of required animal and human tests. The Vioxx incident (SN: 10/30/04, p. 286: Available to subscribers at COX-2 inhibitor pulled off market) and growing uncertainty about the safety of other approved medications such as Celebrex and naproxen are highlighting inadequacies of current testing methods. If time-honored testing on laboratory animals and groups of people isn’t enough, maybe biomedical specialists should think outside of the box, some scientists have reasoned.