Winners

2023 Maddox Prize

Nancy Olivieri, a Senior Scientist at Toronto General Hospital, has been awarded the 2023 John Maddox Prize for communicating the importance of being open with patients about medical research whilst withstanding great personal cost.  

She has been commended by the judges who said: 

In 1996, Olivieri was working at the SickKids Hospital in Toronto, acting as lead investigator in a clinical trial of deferiprone. Deferiprone is a medicine used to remove excess iron from the body in patients with thalassaemia major. She began to suspect the drug was causing serious adverse events, which Apotex, the drug manufacturer and a funder of the trial, denied. When Olivieri indicated she intended to inform participants of her concerns, Apotex terminated the trials and invoked a confidentiality agreement in the research contract and threatened legal action if she made the findings public. Undeterred, Olivieri shared her results at a scientific meeting and submitted them for publication.    

Through her actions, Olivieri championed the importance of patient safety. In 2000 Olivieri was fired from her position at SickKids hospital and charged with professional misconduct, despite the fact it was revealed that the hospital had received a large donation from Apotex. From 2000 to 2009 Olivieri worked at the University Hospital Network (UHN), but she was subsequently replaced with a clinician supported by Apotex. 

In 2009 the FDA declined Apotex’s request for approval of deferiprone as first-line therapy. In 2011, the FDA issued approval for deferiprone as “last resort” therapy, to be prescribed only after first-line therapies had failed, cautioning that no controlled trials of deferiprone had demonstrated direct treatment benefit. The licensing conditions for deferiprone continue to vary around the world. 

2023 Early Career Award

Chelsea Polis, a senior scientist of epidemiology at the Population Council’s Center for Biomedical Research, New York, has been awarded the Maddox early career prize for her courage in challenging false marketing claims made by medical device manufacturers.  

She has been commended by the judges, who said: 

Polis works towards improving global sexual and reproductive health on issues including contraception, HIV, abortion, and infertility. She is an advocate for ensuring that policies around controversial issues in reproductive health are backed up by high quality scientific research. From 2020-2022 Polis was unsuccessfully sued by the medical device company Valley Electronics for publicly sharing her scientific and regulatory concerns pertaining to their marketing of the Daysy fertility device. Her efforts lead to the company’s misleading paper being retracted from scientific literature. Polis also shared her concerns with the FDA, which resulted in them telling Valley Electronics to change their marketing language that they used to promote Daysy.