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Dr. Dialecti Voudouris, 48, of Queens, who practiced in Manhattan, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate the anti-kickback statute, in connection with a scheme to prescribe Subsys, a potent fentanyl-based spray, in exchange for bribes and kickbacks from Subsys’s manufacturer, Insys Therapeutics, said Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
According to the allegations contained in the indictment, Subsys is a powerful painkiller approximately 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine.
The FDA approved Subsys only for the management of breakthrough pain in cancer patients.
In an effort to increase sales of the drug, the company organized a Speakers Group which included doctors that would educate other physicians about the benefits of the drug and how to sue it. Instead, most of the events turned in to social gathering with fake names put on the roster, the complaint said.
Voudouris became part of the group in 2014 and was told by Insys executives that she would be expected to increase the number of prescriptions she wrote for the drugs.
In the months following, the complaint says the number of prescriptions written by Voudouris rose significantly. By the end of the first quarter of 2015, Voudouris – who had prescribed very minimal quantities of Subsys prior to becoming a Speaker for Insys – was approximately the 10th-highest prescriber of Subsys nationally, accounting for total net sales of Subsys of $581,500 in that quarter alone.
Voudouris pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate the anti-kickback statute, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. She is scheduled to be sentenced on January 3, 2020.
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