Light blue touch paper and stand back...we're in for a kicking

"Drug companies have long been castigated by lawmakers and advocacy groups for a lack of openness on research, and the investigation shows just how far individual firms have gone to skirt the disclosure law. But while the industry generally performed poorly, major medical schools, teaching hospitals, and nonprofit groups did worse overall — many of them far worse."

The federal government has the power to impose fines on institutions that fail to disclose trial results, or suspend their research funding. It could have collected a whopping $25 billion from drug companies alone in the past seven years. But it has not levied a single fine.


It is claimed that "Stanford University, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and other prestigious medical research institutions have flagrantly violated a federal law requiring public reporting of study results, depriving patients and doctors of complete data to gauge the safety and benefits of treatments, a STAT investigation has found.

The violations have left gaping holes in a federal database used by millions of patients, their relatives, and medical professionals, often to compare the effectiveness and side effects of treatments for diseases.

The worst offenders included four of the top 10 recipients of federal medical research funding from the National Institutes of Health: Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of California, San Diego. All disclosed research results late or not at all at least 95 percent of the time since reporting became mandatory in 2008.

If interested read this post (CLICK HERE).

So take a deep breathe before you start to rant at me, because we are guilty of not writing up clinical studies in a timely fashion, just as some of our experimental stuff has not yet seen the light of day.

So I am not going to comment on this to save words like "calling the kettle black" come out...as you will say what has happened to the Charcot project........more like the Chilcott Project and all air and nothing to be seen. 

You are not quite correct on this as the Investigator meeting was only this month and not years ago as you think, but it is true results take time to surface and this is particularly the case with negative results. 

Journals are not interested in negative studies and companies are not interested in publishing negative studies as it is not part of the marketing strategy. Sometimes even positive ones do not surface for example the cladribine studies reported in AAN in 2013 have not surfaced or data from 2009 reported at ECTRIMS etc, etc, etc.

Was it that the trial failed because the treatment was no good or was it because you were filled with hot air when you said you would volunteer for the study when you actually won't so the study never got off the ground. Or was it that we over estimated interest or was it the study was registered but never funded and so it never started.

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