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Medical Group Calls for Sharing Research Results
By Jonathan Knight
In December, the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association (AMA) unanimously approved a resolution aimed at eliminating from agreements between physician researchers and pharmaceutical companies restrictive clauses that interfere with sharing scientific information. The resolution calls on the AMA to work with other organizations to develop guidelines to accomplish this goal, and for the AMA itself "to protect the right of physician researchers to present, publish, and disseminate data from clinical trials."
The AMA's resolution is in line with steps taken in recent years by other professional organizations, research universities, and the federal government to deal with conflicts of interest and bias in scientific research. These include several reports issued by the Association of American Medical Colleges starting in 2001 on individual and institutional financial conflicts of interest in human subject research; regulations adopted or revised by universities to prevent conflicts of interest especially in studies involving human subjects; and new rules announced by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in February 2005 that, with very limited exceptions, prohibit its employees from receiving compensation of any sort from a company or organization that is an NIH funding applicant, grantee, or contractor.
The AAUP's 2001 Statement on Corporate Funding of Academic Research, published in the May-June 2001 issue of Academe, emphasized the continuing importance of universities' having conflict-of-interest policies, and the faculty's role in their formulation and review of their effectiveness. "Research universities have long collaborated with industry to their mutual benefit," the report points out, but the relationship "has never been free of concerns that the financial ties of researchers and their institutions to industry may exert pressure on the design and outcome of research."
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