Funding by big pharma does bias research.(POINT/COUNTERPOINT)

Does pharmaceutical industry funding bias research?

Over the last few years, concern about industry-funded bias in research has been growing.

The pharmaceutical industry funds slightly more than half of the research being done today. The National Institutes of Health comes next, funding 29%, and the rest is funded by academic institutions, nonprofits, and non-NIH-affiliated federal organizations.

Industry-sponsored studies, when published in peer-reviewed journals, are four times more likely to be favorable to the sponsor's drug, device, or treatment than are non-industry-sponsored studies, according to a meta-analysis of 30 studies published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ 2003;326:1167-71). Sponsored studies that deal with psychiatric drugs are five times more likely to be favorable than are similar studies that are not funded by the pharmaceutical industry (Am. J. Psychiatry 2005;162:1957-60).

A study published in JAMA, which involved 205 drug studies, found that among the industry-funded studies, 66% were likely to be favorable to the study drug, whereas among those studies that were not industry funded, 40% were likely to be favorable (JAMA 2006;295:2270-4).

Corporate-sponsored meta-analyses are five times more likely to report a favorable conclusion for the drug that is the subject of the meta-analysis. In addition, when corporate-sponsored studies are favorable, they tend to be published many times. As a result, the same sample of patients is pulled into repeated meta-analyses, essentially producing an echo effect.

Corporate-sponsored studies that turn out to be negative tend never to get published. Or, they get spun to suggest a positive outcome. An example of the marketing consequences of such selective ...