• The New York Times, Tuesday, June 12, 2007 11:15 AM

Documents that have emerged in a federal civil lawsuit in Boston show that big pharmaceutical companies sometimes calculated to the penny the profits that doctors could make from prescribing their cancer drugs. Sales representatives then shared those profit estimates with doctors and their staffs, the documents show.

For example, in 1998, Schering-Plough told its reps that Intron-A--a treatment for bladder cancer--could produce a profit for each patient of "$2,373.84 for our physicians just on the drug alone." Pitching Zoladex, a treatment for prostate cancer, a sales rep for AstraZeneca was more blunt. "DO THE MATH!" he wrote in a letter to a group of urologists in Arizona.

Dr. Robert Geller, an oncologist who worked in private practice from 1996 to 2005, says that cancer doctors knew the profits they could make and in some cases would change treatment regimens or offer unnecessary care to make extra money.

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