Tag: industry ties

Pharmalot’s Ed Silverman reports on a Senate bill aimed at loosening requirements around the reporting of financial conflicts of interest between companies and physicians....

For STAT, Ed Silverman reports on growing concerns about the industry ties of the new nominee for FDA commissioner.  “The nomination comes at a...

The UK Times reports that pharmaceutical companies are actively lobbying to limit the release of clinical trial data to the public. Rather than limiting results and data to medical journals, new transparency initiatives are pushing for making the information publically available. The push for transparency comes in the wake of the reanalysis of the Study 329 data on paroxetine (marketed as Seroxat and Paxil), which found that the industry study had misconstrued its results.

A massive number of meta-analyses of antidepressant clinical trials have financial conflicts of interest and are unduly influenced by pharmaceutical companies, according to a review to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. Researchers also found that meta-analyses with industry ties almost never report any negative findings in their abstracts.

The Scientific American reports on a new analysis of antidepressant trials revealing that the vast majority of meta-analyses have industry links and suppress negative results.

Bernie Sanders joins numerous public health groups and opposes Robert Califf's nomination to lead the FDA over industry ties.

Sheila Kaplan for the Boston Globe reports that Dr. Robert Califf, the Obama administration's nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), has removed his name from a series of scientific papers that he recently coauthored. The decision to remove his name, against publication ethics standards, has brought Califf under renewed criticism.

Yesterday, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) released an editorial entitled “Confluence, Not Conflict of Interest: Name Change Necessary.” The authors argue that the phrase “conflict of interest is pejorative,” and a better term “would be confluence of interest, implying an alingnment of primary and secondary interests.”

In Saturday’s New York Times, Sabrina Tavernise describes the close industry ties of Dr. Robert Califf, a cardiologist and researcher recently tapped by the Obama administration to head the FDA. In a conflict of interest statement published last year, Califf “declared financial support from more than 20 companies,” leading some public health advocates to “question whether his background could tilt him in the direction of an industry he would be in charge of supervising.” Tavernise points to a presentation Califf gave on “Disrupting Clinical Research: Transforming a System” in 2014 where he singled out regulation as a barrier to research and innovation. “I think it illuminates his thinking,” Daniel Carpenter, a Harvard professor who studies the FDA, said of the slide. “In a sense, he’s the ultimate industry insider.”

On Tuesday, the Obama administration nominated Dr. Robert Califf to be the new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In a statement, director of the Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, Dr. Michael Carome called on the Senate to reject the nomination. He contends that Califf “racked up a long history of extensive financial ties to multiple drug and medical device companies, including Amgen, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Merck Sharp & Dohme and Sanofi-Aventis, to name a few.”