Almost one in three (29%) large clinical trials in the United States remain unpublished five years after they are finished, according to scientists writing in the British Medical Journal. Of those, 78% have no results at all in the public domain.
The Guardian.
“GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has been accused of market “abuse” by the consumer watchdog, the Office of Fair Trading (OFT).”
BBC News.
The pharmaceutical company Roche has announced that it will make more of the data from its clinical trials available to researchers. It’s estimated that half of all clinical trials have never been published and positive trial results are twice as likely to be published as negative findings. The AllTrials campaign wants the pharmaceutical industry to publish all data, and is supported by the Wellcome Trust, the BMJ and NICE.BBC News.
The government wants to make all publicly funded research available – but the same must be demanded of pharmas also.
Cory Doctorow’s column series Digital Rights, Digital Wrongs for The Guardian.
Read also this blog entry on open access to all data from clinical trials by Tom Jefferson, member of the Open Knowledge Foundation.
This article on how open data can save money refers to Tom Jefferson’s blog entry advising that
pharmaceutical companies must release all the results of their clinical trials as open data, so that independent researchers can check what has been found.
Ben Goldcare elucidates what’s wrong in the pharma industry.
The fixes are fairly simple, really. We need to make sure that all results from all clinical trials are always published, with no exceptions. What’s more, we need to go and dig up all the results from trials that were run in the past, because those are the trials that were done on the drugs that we are currently using.
The Economist (The Q&A).