The Washington Post (11/24, Whoriskey) reported that in a review of articles published in the New England Journal of Medicine, “60 were funded by a pharmaceutical company, 50 were co-written by drug company employees and 37 had a lead author, typically an academic, who had previously accepted outside compensation from the sponsoring drug company in the form of consultant pay, grants or speaker fees.” One reason for that is that “since about the mid-1980s, research funding by pharmaceutical firms has exceeded what the National Institutes of Health spends.” The Post noted that in 2011, spending totals were $39 billion from industry and $31 billion from the NIH, and the Post adds that “over the past decade corporate interference has repeatedly muddled the nation’s drug science, sometimes with potentially lethal consequences.” As examples, the Post cites the “controversies over blockbuster drugs…erupted amid charges that the companies had shaped their research to obscure the dangerous side effects.”
Related Links:
— “As drug industry’s influence over research grows, so does the potential for bias, ” Peter Whoriskey, The Washington Post, November 24, 2012.