Drug Research Rife with Conflicts of Interest

Several news stories and a white paper report, all address the subject of drug researchers having a conflict of interest due to the money from the drug companies, and the inability of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to adequately reform the situation. The Government Accountability Project released an April 2009 report called "The ABC's of Drug Safety", that questions the safety and results of drug trials.

According to their website, the Government Accountability Project (GAP) is a 30-year-old nonprofit public interest group that promotes government and corporate accountability by advancing occupational free speech, defending whistleblowers, and empowering citizen activists. Mark Cohen, GAP Executive Director and coauthor of the report, stated "The current clinical trial reform process is rife with conflicts of interest that put trial subjects at risk and produce suspect data on drug safety and efficacy. Making matters worse, federal oversight is wholly inadequate."

"The FDA system of ensuring drug safety is a work-in-progress," stated Sheila Fleischhacker, author of the GAP report. "Some of the FDA's new regulations are steps in the right direction, but the overall process still has too many gaps that put the public at risk."

One of the main problems noted is that while the drug companies have continued to grow, the FDA budget has continued to shrink. The GAP report noted that this has set up a situation where the FDA has been forced to "heavily rely on fees it receives from the very industry it is supposed to regulate."

The executive summary of the GAP report also included a quote from Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and a senior lecturer at the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Angell maintains that all clinical trials should be administered by the National Institutes of Health: "It is self-evidently absurd to look to investor-owned companies for unbiased evaluations of their own products. Yet many academic investigators and their institutions pretend otherwise, and it is convenient and profitable for them to do so."

An article on April 10, 2009 from Reuters UK also looked at the conflict of interest by interviewing Dr. Bruce Psaty of the University of Washington, who published an article on using beta-blockers to treat high blood pressure. Since the article was favorable for the drug companies Dr. Psaty then noticed that the drug companies approached him to do more work. He recalled, "My family and I were invited to a first-class resort, where I presented the results at a sponsored conference." He then agreed to create a slide presentation but felt "a kind of social duty to reciprocate both the kindness and the investment made by the sponsor in the slide set."

Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University in North Carolina, stated in the Reuters UK article, "It's human instinct. If someone does something nice -- gives you $5 million in a research grant -- don't you want to do something nice back to them?"

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