CorpWatch : Medical Trial Data Activists Score Win Over Glaxo

Pills. Photo: e-magineart.com. Used under Creative Commons licenseAll data on completed medical experiments are to be made available to the general public by GlaxoSmithKline, the biggest UK pharmaceutical company. The announcement is a major win for the AllTrials campaign mounted by healthcare activists as well as researchers that has gathered widespread support. “There is a fundamental lack of scientific progress because clinical trial evidence is being withheld,” Carl Heneghan, the director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford said when the campaign was launched last month. “The missing results from the last 20 years also represent lost opportunities to replicate results and learn from all that research, and to develop some of it in light of new discoveries.” Support has flooded in from groups like the U.S. National Physicians Alliance, the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care and the UK Medical Research Council, as well as from the British Library and the British Medical Journal.The campaign provided an opportunity for GlaxoSmithKline which is seeking to get beyond the negative publicity generated by a massive $3 billion fine last year for pushing bupropion for sexual dysfunction and weight loss and targeting children with paroxetine, an antidepressant, despite a lack of approval for either. Paroxetine - better known as Paxil in the U.S. - is an antidepressant that was licensed only for adults. Doctors are allo...
Source: PharmaGossip - Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: Source Type: blogs