Two items on drug companies and research.
A study out of Boston Children’s Hospital found that drugs in industry-funded trails were much more likely to prove effective than those funded by government agencies like NIH.
Here is the abstract from the Annals of Internal Medicine:
This study examined associations between the funding sources of 546 registered trials of drugs in 5 commonly prescribed classes and published outcomes that favored the new intervention over the control or comparison. Industry-funded trials reported favorable outcomes in 85.4% of publications, compared with 50.0% for government-funded trials and 71.9% for nonprofit or nonfederal organization-funded trials. Industry-funded trials were also less likely to be published within 24 months of completion than were trials with other funding sources.
The research team was led by Florence Bourgeois, of Children’s Hospital Division of Emergency Medicine.
More from the Children’s Hospital press release:
The researchers acknowledge that the pharmaceutical industry was probably more selective in which trials it funded, helping to account for their greater proportion of favorable outcomes. “Industry is very good at knowing what they want to study, and industry-sponsored studies are more efficient and well funded,” says Bourgeois, the study’s first author. “But despite these potential biases, this is a stunning result.”
Science and commerce also promise to clash when the National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer’s Association issues new guidelines for the “early diagnosis” of Alzheimer’s. Some researchers say the move will trigger a surge of new, marginally effective drugs.
In a New York Times article on the debate, one local doctor disagreed.
_"Certainly, we are not out there trying to help drug companies," said Dr. Reisa Sperling of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. But the situation today — nearly all drugs are tested only in people who have severe symptoms — seems a recipe for failure.
“We are trying these drugs way too late,” Dr. Sperling said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.
But, said Dr. Jason Karlawish, an Alzheimer’s researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who was not part of the conference call, it is not unreasonable to worry about the role of drug companies.
“They are driven by profits over progress and by trying to move a drug as fast as they can into the clinic without getting all the good evidence they need,” Dr. Karlawish said. _