Drug company drops case after EMA agrees to redactions in some documents to be published

AbbVie, one of two US drug companies that took legal action against the European Medicines Agency to try to stop it releasing previously secret clinical trial data, has dropped its lawsuits after agreeing that the documents may be disclosed with redactions to protect commercially sensitive information.

The London based drug regulator began a transparency initiative in 2010, resolving to disclose, on request, clinical study reports on drugs that had gone through the approval process. The policy saw it release nearly two million pages of data without legal challenge, but the process …