Scrutinizing Industry-Funded Science: The Crusade Against Conflicts of Interest
A report was released from the American Council on Science and Health titled: Scrutinizing Industry-Funded Science: The Crusade Against Conflicts of Interest. The seventy page report outlines the history of the conflicts of interest industry and the potential for harm that the COI crusade causes.
Below is a synopsis of the report from their website:
For approximately a century, industry has been a powerful motivating force in the creation of new technology and the underwriting of scientific research. Yet the last two decades have seen the development of a sweeping conflicts of interest movement aimed squarely at curtailing academic/industry biomedical research collaborations and restricting membership on government scientific advisory boards to researchers associated with industry.
Conflicts of interest activists assert that ties between researchers and industry are harming patients and consumers, undermining public trust in research, food safety and environmental regulation and boosting the costs of medicine and other products. As evidence, they repeatedly point to the same handful of research “scandals” and have produced a number of studies correlating industry sponsorship with favorable results in clinical research. In addition, the anti-industry activist groups are trying to exclude academic researchers who have any ties whatsoever to industry from government scientific advisory boards. However, even the activists’ own flawed studies can’t demonstrate that industry “influence” is distorting the decisions made by those boards. The campaign to purge any experts with industry ties—no matter how slender—from advisory panels is chilling scientific debate and depriving regulators and the public of valuable insights.
These conflicts of interest activists focus almost entirely on the alleged baleful effects of financial conflicts of interest while ignoring how other conflicts can bias scientific research and advice to government agencies. People are influenced by all sorts of interests besides money. Why should having once consulted with Pfizer or DuPont disqualify a scientist from serving on a government advisory board or writing a review article in a scientific journal, while being a lifelong member of Greenpeace does not? And if owning $10,000 in Dow stock represents a potential conflict of interest, surely $10,000 in funding from the Union of Concerned Scientists does too.
Contrary to the claims of conflicts of interest activists, the overwhelming majority of patients and research subjects are not being harmed, public trust in scientists and scientific research remains extremely high, and new drugs not only save lives but money. CenterWatch, which tracks 59,000 clinical trials in the United States, found that industry-sponsored drug trials are in fact safer than those at academic institutions funded by government. Polls regularly show that physicians and scientists are two of the most trusted professions. In fact, a recent poll found that three-quarters of cancer patients would have no qualms about enrolling in a study of a treatment sponsored by a company in which a researcher owns stock or from which he/she receives royalties. And finally, econometric research shows that newer drugs, rather than increasing overall medical costs (and thus arguably being foisted in a fraudulent fashion on a cash-strapped public), reduce other medical expenses by a factor of five.1
The current obsession with conflicts of interest is not harmless. The activists have provoked the development of unnecessary and complex academic regulations and restrictions that are interfering with the speedy translation of scientific discoveries into effective treatments and new products and technologies. Instead of improving public health or making our environment safer and cleaner, the activities of conflict of interest activists are harming them. Researchers are abandoning universities and some are even leaving the country for locales in which academic-industry collaboration is encouraged rather than denigrated and penalized. Government agencies are being denied access to sound scientific advice, which distorts regulatory priorities, risks lives and raises costs.
When abuses have been uncovered, private entities including journals, universities and scientific professional societies have adequately addressed them. Such private solutions include the advent of permanent online peer-review of scientific studies and the requirement by scientific journals that all clinical trials be registered. These private efforts are undercutting the campaign by activists to have Congress enact onerous conflicts of interest regulations.
The plain fact of the matter is that there is very little evidence that alleged conflicts of interests are significantly distorting scientific research, harming consumers and patients or misleading public policy. Most conflicts of interest activists clearly have prior strong ideological commitments against markets and corporations. They view the conflicts of interest campaign as another tool to attack an enterprise which they already despise on other grounds.