A survey of hospital review boards that oversee experiments on patients shows that one in three members takes money from companies that make drugs and medical devices that come under study.
What’s more, many of those with conflicts rarely or never disclose their financial ties, researchers found.
The study of 100 university medical centers is said to be the first to look at financial conflicts of interest on hospitals’ institutional review boards. IRBs are little-known committees responsible for protecting patients in research experiments.
The study’s findings are alarming, said some patient advocates.
If the review board “is riddled with financial conflicts of interest, it’s not going to be as protective as it should be,” said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of the Public Citizen’s Health Research Group.
The study was published in this week’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Corporate funding of medical research is common and a mainstay in the translation of scientific discoveries into medical treatments. But in the past five years, there has been heightened scrutiny of the financial ties between researchers and the companies that make experimental drugs and devices.
The question: Do medical researchers always act in the best interest of science – or patients – if they are also getting royalties, consulting fees or other benefits from the makers of the products being tested? All federally funded research must be reviewed and approved by IRBs, which consider patient safety as well as ethical conflicts.
Most members of these boards are volunteers, usually doctors or scientists themselves, who get no extra pay for their service.
They are expected to be more sensitive to ethical concerns than the researchers they monitor, said Dr. Jerome Kassirer, a former New England Journal of Medicine editor who wrote a book in 2005 on medical conflicts of interest.
Now researchers are “finally getting around to looking at all the ways that pharmaceutical companies can have an adverse influence on health,” he added.
