According to a study published on Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, drug trials funded by the pharmaceutical industry report positive outcomes 85 percent of the time, compared with 50 percent for government-funded trials and 72 percent for trials funded by nonprofit or non-federal organizations.
This doesn t mean that pharmaceutical companies are unduly influencing science, according to ACSH s Jeff Stier. As the study researchers pointed out, the pharmaceutical industry is more discriminatory than the federal government in determining which studies to fund, which could account for the discrepancy in statistics.
Stier believes that drug companies are simply more likely to fund studies that will show positive results. It s articles like this that further promote the notion that the drug industry is manipulating data due to alleged conflicts of interest, but regulators and the media shouldn t consider studies like this as evidence that industry-funded science is somehow compromised.
Clinical drug studies adhere to stringent protocols that aim to prevent any conflicts of interest, points out ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross. Studies are independently audited, and often, independently performed. The drug researchers who developed the product do not actually perform the clinical trials, which again, are conducted by an independent group. He adds, Also, the results are analyzed with the same degree of independence as employed by PriceWaterhouse when tallying the Oscar ballots.
