PIXABAY, PARENTINGUPSTREAMWhile it is nearly universally accepted that biomedical researchers—and those who approve their studies in humans—ought to disclose any relationships they have with biotech or pharmaceutical firms, one in five members of institutional review boards (IRBs) don’t always come clean. Still, that number, taken from a survey published today (July 13) in JAMA Internal Medicine, is a big improvement from the nearly half of IRB members who reported a lack of such disclosure back in 2005.
“The findings . . . suggest that actions and safeguards related to IRB oversight have improved in recent years, but there is progress to be made in attaining the conditions needed for the ethical conduct of human studies,” Laura Weiss Roberts of Stanford University School of Medicine wrote in a commentary accompanying the study.
IRBs are tasked with making sure human experiments are up to ethical code. Massachusetts General Hospital’s Eric Campbell and his colleagues surveyed more than 400 IRB members at US medical schools and hospitals in 2014. The same team sent out a similar questionnaire in 2005, although the participants are not necessarily the same bunch. The proportion of respondents who reported having an industry tie in 2005 and 2014 remained the same—roughly ...
