With Meningitis Outbreak, a Spotlight on Family Behind Compounding Pharmacy

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The New York Times
Thursday, October 25, 2012

With Meningitis Outbreak, a Spotlight on Family Behind Compounding Pharmacy

By ABBY GOODNOUGH, SABRINA TAVERNISE and ANDREW POLLACK

A $4.2 million, four-bedroom Boston penthouse overlooking the Charles River in the Back Bay neighborhood. A $3.5 million home in Southborough, Mass., with more than 11,000 square feet, a home theater and an indoor saltwater pool. A $2.35 million vacation home on Cape Cod.

For the Conigliaro family of Massachusetts, owners of these properties, the past decade had been one of business success and rising personal prosperity.

Starting with a recycling company created by one brother in 1990, the family branched into pharmaceuticals, riding changes in the health care landscape to become a major supplier of tailor-made drugs to hospitals, clinics and doctor’s offices across the nation.

But those family enterprises are now under intense scrutiny by federal and state authorities and personal-injury lawyers. A pharmaceutical compounding company that is part of the family portfolio — the New England Compounding Center — was the source of a fungus that led to a meningitis outbreak that as of Wednesday had killed 24 and sickened 317.

Massachusetts officials said Tuesday that during an inspection this month investigators had found dirty mats and hoods, a leaky boiler, dark debris floating in vials of medicine, and evidence that the lab was not leaving enough time to properly sterilize some of its products.

Officials have pledged to revoke the licenses of Barry J. Cadden, a brother-in-law who was the head pharmacist at New England Compounding, and of the pharmacy itself. And production at the family’s larger pharmaceutical company, Ameridose, has been suspended and is also being investigated.

As the cases mount, the Conigliaros have stayed out of the public eye, speaking only through a longtime lawyer.

But the release of records by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health on Monday, as well as interviews with former employees of the drug companies, offer new details about the family and how the businesses operated.

Since the national outbreak began in September, most of the scrutiny has been focused on two founders of New England Compounding, Gregory Conigliaro, an entrepreneur who has run a major recycling operation for two decades, and Mr. Cadden, the pharmacist who married Mr. Conigliaro’s sister Lisa, also a pharmacist.

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