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A Broken System

Marcia Angell, MD

JAMA. 2008;300(9):1069-1071.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Over the past 2 decades, the pharmaceutical industry has gained unprecedented control over the evaluation of its own products. Drug companies now finance most clinical research on prescription drugs, and there is mounting evidence that they often skew the research they sponsor to make their drugs look better and safer. Two recent articles underscore the problem: one showed that many publications concerning Merck's rofecoxib that were attributed primarily or solely to academic investigators were actually written by Merck employees or medical publishing companies hired by Merck¹; the other showed that the company manipulated the data analysis in 2 clinical trials to minimize the increased mortality associated with rofecoxib.² Bias in the way industry-sponsored research is conducted and reported is not unusual and by no means limited to Merck.³

The problem is not so much the sponsorship itself but the terms. Before the 1980s, industry grants to . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Author Affiliation: Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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