Sharing is caring

In the fiercely competitive pharmaceutical industry there is a fine line between confidentiality and secrecy. We are all aware of the vast sums that are spent on researching potential new products, the majority of which are never commercialised. But once a drug has either made it to market or has fallen by the wayside, is it right for manufacturers to keep the results of their clinical trials secret?

Leading charity Cancer Research UK warned last month that the failure to put this information in the public domain was denying doctors the opportunity to provide the best possible treatment for their patients. It suggests that data from more than 25% of all cancer clinical trials may remain inaccessible, which means that doctors are unable to view the entire picture of how a treatment works, how it compares with other therapies and what choices could serve patients best.

But it's not just patients and doctors who are being placed at a disadvantage. Drug companies themselves must be spending billions of dollars each year chasing false leads. But they will never know how many companies have been down those same down blind alleys because there is no incentive to publish results of unsuccessful trials.

The reason cited for not making all results available is lack of time and shortage of funds. But that simply doesn't stand up against the r&d time and cost that might have been saved by the knowledge that someone else had already explored that route unsuccessfully.

If a particular piece of research leads nowhere, it is not a case of being 'named and shamed', but more a matter of 'sharing is caring'.

There are some hopeful signs, however. In the UK, the ABPI has set up a register on its website where eight companies now post their results. A Europe-wide register of all unpublished data is set to become available to regulatory authorities under a new EU directive. Recently GSK and Eli Lilly agreed to publish the results of clinical tests on their drugs on an open database, while on 1 October, an internet-based registry containing summaries of findings since 2002 was launched by the US lobby group PhRMA.

And 11 scientific journals have called on researchers and companies to register trials at the start so that unflattering or unclear results cannot be covered up. Furthermore, they have also agreed not to publish studies that fail to register straight away.

These moves will go some way to improving transparency, but there is still a long road ahead before all data is made freely available to the wider scientific community. To a community that includes some of the greatest intellects in the world, this is surely a 'no-brainer'.