This is very unfortunate. As part of its controversial patent lawsuit over Gleevec in India, the drugmaker reportedly submitted a position paper by an Indian government panel, which determinted the country’s patent laws don’t conform to World Health Organization trade rules.

Turns out, though, the five-member expert panel copped some lines from a study written by a UK think tank that’s allegedly financed by the pharmaceutical industry, according to India’s Business Standard newspaper.

R.A. Mashelkar, a former head of the government’s science and industry council who oversaw the panel, is withdrawing the findings on “ethical grounds,” he tells the paper. The problem, he says, were “technical inaccuracies.”

It’s just so hard to find reliable evidence these days, isn’t it?

[tags]Gleevec, Novartis, Patents[/tags]