… GlaxoSmithKline has stopped doing it, UD notes this lament for the end of the practice.
But, of course, [people will say,] these experts are being PAID. How can they be trusted?
Well, can we really expect experts to do this on a pro bono basis? I doubt that any of us would agree to take time to do this sort of work for free.
How in the world can you expect to find one doctor or researcher in the United States willing to review – FOR FREE! – the data on a new drug that might benefit millions?
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More on GSK’s decision:
Neil Barnes, head of respiratory medicines for GSK, says the days of drug companies paying for doctors to attend conferences to listen to doctors paid to speak are coming to end. “It is going to be like smoking on aeroplanes. People will look back and say ‘did we really used to do that?’”
But of course the scandal is what pharma continues to do.
Adriane Fugh-Berman, associate professor of pharmacology at Georgetown University in Washington and an activist for more transparency in drug marketing, says that while GSK’s reforms remove the conflict of interest for individual doctors they do not remove the wider problem of industry influence over medics. “I would be much more impressed if they were getting out of medical education altogether,” she says.
January 14th, 2016 at 6:36PM
assholes aside (and that will take out a substantial number of folks at the top of the pack) it’s tough because without “outside” funding more and more universities won’t give researchers space, equipment, or staff and the federal well has run pretty dry so may be harder to get quality feedback than one might imagine.
January 15th, 2016 at 5:02PM
dmf, mostly agree. My local Podunk Tech is a less selective, working-stiff state university. Outside funding is, indeed, lauded in the student newspaper and I-love-me campus newsletters.
What’s really disgusting is that our Podunk Tech accepts money for proprietary research, while at the same time accepting money from very naïve donors for purposes that conflict with that proprietary research. I don’t have a handy specific example, but imagine a chump donating a million dollars for “peace studies” to a university that gets $10 million for DoD work.
January 16th, 2016 at 10:15PM
Industry could, of course, pay taxes and have an independent government agency fund researchers to evaluate their drugs. Or, they could donate to independent foundations who could fund researchers to evaluate their drugs.
January 16th, 2016 at 11:01PM
Anon: Precisely. There are many ways the review could take place.
January 17th, 2016 at 3:40PM
industry pay taxes, in this country?