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Academia fails to protect research from industry bias

Drug company dollars taint much of medical research, study reports.

By Myrle Croasdale, AMNews staff.

Medical colleges routinely ignore guidelines created to maintain the integrity of clinical research when collaborating with the pharmaceutical industry, according to a study published in the Oct. 24 New England Journal of Medicine.

The study revealed that schools rarely followed guidelines from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors to ensure that their investigators had full participation in the design of trials, free access to trial data and the right to publish their findings, including editorial control.

Other safeguards, such as having an independent executive committee, data and safety monitoring board, or publications committee, were also not incorporated into research agreements between universities and commercial firms. Without taking such steps, medical schools are failing to protect the validity of their research and are risking losing the trust of the public, the study concluded.

In a related article in the same issue, it was noted that recent reviews of research guidelines focused only on clinical research, though nonclinical research is attracting significant commercial sponsorship and merits the same attention to conflicts of interest.

"Basic research in normal biology and disease mechanisms is growing increasingly dependent on sophisticated techniques and complex equipment with high initial costs and high maintenance costs," the authors stated, making it all the more difficult for academic institutions to find sufficient funding outside of the pharmaceutical industry.

Whether clinical or nonclinical work is being done, the growing scale of collaboration between the pharmaceutical industry and medical schools has prompted intense scrutiny of conflict of interest issues.

But research guidelines that have been released to date should be considered just starting points, the authors said, with basic science research and nonclinical studies needing better oversight to keep commercial bias from influencing results or limiting access to information.

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