Journal of the National Cancer Institute Advance Access originally published online on June 27, 2007
JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute 2007 99(13):988-990; doi:10.1093/jnci/djm057
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© Oxford University Press 2007.
NEWS |
Small Study on Industry Trial Sponsorship Leads to Big Questions About Quality and Bias
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Pharmaceutical industry support has far surpassed federal funding for clinical research in the United States. And many drugs currently under development are designed by the industry to fight cancer. So researchers at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute undertook a small project to see if there was any association between pharmaceutical company involvement and outcomes in breast cancer clinical trials. It was the only study of its kind conducted in breast cancer research and only the second on any type of cancer.
Published in April in Cancer, the paper looked at 140 studies conducted in 1993, 1998, and 2003arbitrarily chosen 5-year spansand found no statistically significant difference between positive outcomes and industry versus nonindustry authorship (78% versus 66%). But when they focused on the 56 studies published in 2003, when disclosure requirements were the tightest, they found that 84% of studies reporting pharmaceutical
Searching for Bias
Registries Provide Clues