Overhauling Industry-Sponsored Studies

Major pharmaceutical companies have agreed to a handful of recommendations aimed at increasing the transparency of clinical trials they fund.

Written byBob Grant

| 2 min read

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All clinical trial findings—even negative ones—will be made public, author contributions to manuscripts will be made clear, and study authors will have full access to all trial data in industry-funded clinical trials if a list of recommendations hashed out by editors at top medical journals and eight major pharmaceutical companies are actually implemented.

A team of 11 authors from the worlds of Big Pharma and biomedical publishing listed 10 such recommendations in a recent article that ran in the current issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings. The recommendations arose from the Medical Publishing Insights and Practices Initiative, launched in 2008, which includes input from representatives at Merck, Amgen, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and Takeda, as well as editors from 65 biomedical journals, ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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