Should Pharma come clean?

#MSBlog: Should pharma companies release clinical data to the public?

Nigel Hawkes. Drug companies should release data from all trials of licensed drugs, say MPs. BMJ 2013; 346 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.f321

The drug industry should be obliged to release in a publicly accessible form all the information it possesses about trials of licensed drugs, the House of Commons Health Committee has said in a new report on the functioning of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). It should be “neither legal nor ethical” to withhold such data, said the committee. It was concerned that failure to observe this simple principle undermined the effectiveness of NICE, because the institute was forced to appraise drugs without having access to all relevant data.


"This demand is nothing new. Ben Goldacre has been saying this for awhile in various publications and talks. GSK has recently launched an initiative do make its data accessible. You may be interested to know that I am in the process of becoming the custodian of the cladribine data. So there things afoot and I suspect it will only be a matter of time before all trial data is available to the public."

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18 Jul 2012
Ben Goldacre has been able to criticize Big Pharma without resorting to science denialism and I believe that Prof G and his team have been nothing but forthright with their experiences with Big Pharma. ReplyDelete ...

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