Is A Scientific Conflicts of Interest "Witch Hunt" Under Way?
Ronald Bailey | July 28, 2006, 11:54am
That's the question asked by Massachusetts General Hospital endocrinologist David A. Shaywitz in an op/ed in the Boston Globe. To wit:
The national preoccupation with university researchers who collaborate with drug companies has now blossomed into a full-fledged witch hunt. Before we burn these heathen scientists at the stake, however, we might want to step back and examine our underlying assumptions. . . .
Ultimately, the myopic focus on financial conflicts is likely to discourage relationships between university researchers and drug companies--a bad idea, since these associations offer enormous potential for medical advancement.
Whole thing here.
thoreau | July 30, 2006, 10:30am | #
I actually have a high opinion of industry funding of university research. Not just for ideological reasons, but because I saw good things come of it in grad school.
Of course, the industry-funded projects that I saw in grad school were mostly in physics, engineering, materials research, and optics, and most of the work was in the preliminary stage of the product development cycle. They would come to the physics and engineering departments and ask us to work on whether something is feasible. We would work on a general concept, or the feasibility of a particular material, or a way to synthesize something. Turning that process or idea into an actual product to be sold would happen at the company, and nobody would take university involvement as an endorsement of the final product's reliability and performance.
With clinical drug trials it's a little different. The original concept was developed several years ago, if not a decade ago. The university researchers are testing the final product in humans. A natural concern is that conflicts of interest might lead to selective reporting of data, or an experimental design that makes it harder to detect certain side effects, or whatever.
I don't have any experience with those sorts of studies, so I don't know how the researchers handle those concerns, or how well it works in practice. I would observe that even a study that's only partially independent is better for the public than having all of the relevant research done by the drug company itself at its own facilities. However, while that quasi-independence may be an improvement for the consumers (when compared to a drug that is tested entirely at company facilities), it may be a step in the wrong direction for academia. The integrity of academics is the reason why people pay tuition to attend universities. If universities lose their reputation, they have nothing.
What I don't know is if independence is actually compromised for university researchers doing clinical drug trials. But let's remember that the incentives are different for clinical drug trials and preliminary feasibility studies at a university. A negative result in a preliminary study (if that negative result is carefully documented and thoroughly analyzed, to verify that it wasn't simply the student's incompetence that made the result impossible to achieve) can save a company a lot of money, by persuading them not to waste any more time on a dubious idea. A negative result in a clinical trial, however, may terminate a current or potential revenue stream. Granted, a far-sighted analysis may regard that negative result as a boon, but it certainly won't help next quarter's profit statement.
Anyway, I see all of the potential problems here, and I think it would be a mistake to dismiss those potential problems out of hand, but I simply don't know enough to say whether those problems frequently occur in practice.
I should do some full disclosure here: Although I do not receive any pharmaceutical funds, I am working on a project that may be of interest to drug companies. In a couple years I'll go for an academic job, and I fully intend to seek funds from drug companies. I will do this because the project I'm working on is the sort of thing that can help in the preliminary phase of an investigation. It has nothing to do with clinical trials, side effects, and those sorts of things, and everything to do with making sense of the mechanism by which a drug acts. It would be useful in the early stages of an investigation, not in the late stages.
Then again, I have no idea if they're interested in funding universities to conduct research in the early stages of an investigation.
