The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 273 No 7309 p105
24 July 2004

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Access to trial data needed

New standards of transparency must be adopted by the pharmaceutical industry so that clinicians and patients have access to all the information they need when deciding whether or not to use a drug, according to Paul Ramchandani, department of psychiatry, University of Oxford.

Dr Ramchandani’s comments are published this week in Nature (2004;430:401). They relate to unpublished data from trials of antidepressant drugs in children and the subsequent suing of GlaxoSmithKline for allegedly suppressing negative findings from clinical trials. “These events raise serious questions about the reporting of research and the transparency of the drug regulation system,” he says.