This is excellent, and amazing. GSK have just signed up to alltrials.net – Bad Science

GSK have just this minute announced that they are signing up to the alltrials.net campaign. This will be written in a hurry. Briefly: the results of clinical trials have been routinely withheld from doctors and patients throughout medicine, and this problem has not been fixed. The www.alltrials.net campaign is asking for all trials to be registered, for all summary results to be reported, and for full Clinical Study Reports to be made publicly available. CSRs are important, because it is now clear that brief summaries about trials (such as academic journal articles) can be incomplete or misleading. Last Friday I met with Andrew Witty, the head of GSK, to discuss these concerns, and it was clear that they’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these issues. I couldn’t be any happier. This is huge, and internationally huge. GSK have made a commitment to post CSRs online. They have also made sensible noises about the practicalities, which shows that they have thought about the implications, and they also discuss prioritising which CSRs to work on first. Because they have discussed these technical details – while I will always wait for the proof in the pudding – I do not believe this is mere lip service. Since Bad Pharma came out four months ago, we have seen some important positive developments. While the ABPI have attempted to claim – laughably  - that the problem simply does not exist, the House of Commons Health Select Committee have already called on the GMC, NICE, and the pharmaceutical industry to address the problem of missing trials; the Public Accounts Committee may be looking at Tamiflu; the Science and Technology Committee have now announced an Inquiryinto missing trials; there have been questions in parliament, including a PMQ, and there is more to come. The alltrials.net campaign was set up by myself with Sense About Science, Fiona Godlee (BMJ), Sir Iain Chalmers (co-founder of Cochrane), Carl Heneghan (Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine), and Richard Stephens (patient advocate), just a few weeks ago. It has grown rapidly. The campaign at www.alltrials.net is already supported by august bodies including the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society, the National Physicians Alliance from the US, IQWiG (the German equivalent of NICE) and more..."