A pivot point
“It’s just another paper showing there are issues with conflicts of interest in industry trials. I’m not particularly surprised,” said David Moher, PhD, MSc, director of the Centre for Journalology, based at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute.
“It’s sort of high time people from all sides sat down together and tried to resolve how to actually move forward with industry wanting to do trials,” he said. “They are hugely important in drug development. How can these trials be done where the impact of industry and, for that matter, academia is minimized?”
Dr. Gaudino suggested the “ideal situation” would be to have industry put its funding into an existing funding organization, such as the National Institutes of Health or a newly created independent organization – a concept that has been floated before without much forward movement.
“We may be at a pivot point,” Dr. Moher said. “It’s quite clear that COVID has indicated some serious problems with how trials are done, how they’re disseminated, the notion of open science. I think this could be an opportunity. Whether there is so much noise, whether anybody will be able to take any of these initiative forward, I don’t know.”
No matter how trial funding is revised, patients must be brought to the table, he said.
“What frustrates me quite a bit is this almost parental view of all of this – the scientists know best, industry knows best,” Dr. Moher said. “We actually need the most important groups: patients and the public. They need to have an enormous amount of say in how this actually is formed.”
Commenting further, Dr. Moher said that “industry and academia can only do trials when they have patients willing to participate, and yet in the discussions you and I are having, what do patients think about spin in trials? I would imagine they would be horrified that they are going into studies – in a sense in many cases risking their lives – and yet people are spinning the results.”
Dr. Gaudino and Dr. Moher reported having no relevant conflicts of interest.
A version of this story originally appeared on Medscape.com.