Everyone has those movies they love to watch over and over again. For STATus Report host Alex Hogan, the 1993 thriller “The Fugitive” has been in rotation since he was 8 years old. Recently, Hogan realized the movie’s plot — centered around a pharmaceutical company scandal — is exactly the kind of story STAT would cover if it were real.
(Spoilers ahead …)
The film stars Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Kimble, who — when not jumping off spillways and dodging bullets — discovers that the fictional pharmaceutical giant Devlin MacGregor is falsifying clinical trial data in order to get a blockbuster treatment for coronary artery disease approved. The drug, RDU-90 (brand name Provasic) was causing liver damage in patients, but Kimble realizes the samples were tampered with to get the drug past the Food and Drug Administration and ostensibly make billions of dollars.
If something like this actually happened in 2026, it would be an all-hands-on-deck situation here at STAT. We’d have our biotech and pharma reporters covering the scandal, DC reporters finding out what happened at the FDA, and investigative reporters chasing down leads about Devlin MacGregor.
In this special Oscars season episode of STATus Report, Hogan has engaged STAT’s intrepid reporters to imagine how they would jump into the Provasic scandal if it landed on our desks today.
