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The Drug Industry's Long and Ignoble History of Secrecy
By Jeremy Laurance
The Independent UK
Wednesday 27 February 2008
Discovering, testing and bringing a new drug to market can take more than a
decade and cost as much as £500m. Over the past 30 years, as the costs
have mounted, so have the pressures to protect new chemical agents which could
become potential blockbusters.
Secrecy became the pharmaceutical industry's watchword as it sought to control
publication of trials and even manipulate results. Cancer drugs introduced in
the 1990s claimed to offer major benefits which later turned out to be more
apparent than real. Evidence published in The Journal of the American Medical
Association showed that 38 per cent of independent studies of the drugs reached
unfavourable conclusions about them, compared with just 5 per cent of studies
funded by the pharmaceutical industry.
In 2004, UK researchers commissioned by Nice to develop guidelines for prescribing
antidepressant drugs to children tried to obtain unpublished trials from the
drug companies. They were refused. They then contacted the individual researchers
who had worked on the trials. Only then did a picture emerge of increased risk
of attempted suicide, and a lack of efficacy. Nice concluded by banning the
drugs for under-18s with the exception of Prozac.
Yesterday's report suggesting that modern antidepressants offer no significant
clinical benefit over placebo has been dismissed by the drug industry as "just
one study" which should not be allowed to undermine the wealth of research
showing that the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants
are effective.
But that is to miss the point. The Hull University researchers have demonstrated
how partial access to research can give a distorted view of a drug. The non-disclosure
of data on the SSRIs has raised doubts about the trustworthiness of all research
on antidepressants.
We should be relieved that the licensing authorities have an absolute right
to see all trial data, positive and negative, before approving a drug. But,
bizarrely, Nice, with the responsibility for deciding which drugs should be
used by the NHS, only gets what the drug companies agree to give it. The Health
Select Committee has called for action to remedy this omission. Ministers must
respond.
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