Researchers Get Lessons in Transparency From Medical Industry - Government - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"For years, doctors and academic researchers have complained about the medical industry's hiding and manipulation of data from human medical trials, with harmful and even deadly consequences for untold numbers of patients worldwide. Suicides linked to Paxil. Cancers associated with Infuse. Heart attacks tied to Vioxx. A litany of benefits overstated and risks underacknowledged, too often enabled by systems and rules of medical discovery that allow scientific claims without the hard data to prove them. "There's no doubt about this, that patients have suffered and died because of this practice," said Sir Iain Chalmers, a British health-services researcher who has studied the problem. Now, some major companies are starting to turn it around. The medical-technology company Medtronic just paid university scientists to review all records of its human testing of Infuse, a bone-growth protein. The pharmaceutical giant Roche has promised to release internal study data on its influenza drug Tamiflu. The pharmaceutical and biotechnology company GlaxoSmithKline is publicly posting more than a decade's worth of study records. The sudden move toward transparency is a clear win for patients. It's so sudden, in fact, that university researchers, rather than their corporate counterparts, might soon find themselves portrayed as the bigger obstacle to the free flow of information in medical research...."