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This case raises ethical issues involving conflicts of interest arising from industrial funding of academic research; ethical responsibilities of laboratories to funding agencies; ethical responsibilities in the management of a research lab; ethical considerations in appropriate research design; communication in a research group; communication between advisor and graduate student; responsibilities of researchers for the environment; misrepresentation or withholding of scientific results.

The leadership of the global Cochrane Collaboration is acting to allay fears that drug company funding could damage the organisation's independence and credibility. Jim Neilson, a joint chairman of the collaboration, told the BMJ that the collaboration's international steering group was taking the issue seriously. “We are very conscious of the need to maintain the credibility and unbiased nature of Cochrane reviews.” The collaboration produces and disseminates systematic reviews of the evidence about healthcare interventions, and the question of industry funding has dominated …

A study of US medical schools' faculty members serving on institutional review boards found that industry funding is common. About half of review board members are faculty members and about half of these have industry ties ( Academic Medicine 2003;78:1-6) The boards aim to protect patients in clinical research studies by reviewing the protocols before a study begins, approving changes in an ongoing study, and responding to reports of adverse events. “Industry funding is part of the modern scientific enterprise. It's a fact of life. Universities should manage [the relationships] to guard against risks and realise …

ContextWhile medical journals strive to ensure accuracy and the acknowledgment of limitations in articles, press releases may not reflect these efforts.MethodsTelephone interviews conducted in January 2001 with press officers at 9 prominent medical journals and analysis of press releases (n = 127) about research articles for the 6 issues of each journal preceding the interviews.ResultsSeven of the 9 journals routinely issue releases; in each case, the editor with the press office selects articles based on perceived newsworthiness and releases are written by press officers trained in communications. Journals have general guidelines (eg, length) but no standards for acknowledging limitations or for data presentation. Editorial input varies from none to intense. Of the 127 releases analyzed, 29 (23%) noted study limitations and 83 (65%) reported main effects using numbers; 58 reported differences between study groups and of these, 26 (55%) provided the corresponding base rate, the format least prone to exaggeration. Industry funding was noted in only 22% of 23 studies receiving such funding.ConclusionsPress releases do not routinely highlight study limitations or the role of industry funding. Data are often presented using formats that may exaggerate the perceived importance of findings.

The enactment of bill on the future of agriculture, food and forests, which includes a whole section on the forestry and forest-based industry, on October 14, 2014, raises the question of the significance of this law for the industry. Will it have as much impact as the basic law on forestry of 2001? This articles attempts to answer this question looking at the six main topics covered: forestry policy and governance, industry funding, forests and territories, sustainable forest management, illegal logging control, the forestry and forest-based industry and the inter-trade organisations, together with the detailed description of the various measures adopted.

Antibiotic trials in surgical research have most commonly involved the comparison of an antibiotic with either a second antibiotic or a placebo for the treatment or prevention of a surgical infection. The requirement of the pharmaceutical industry to conduct trials of new drugs provides a continuing source of funding that supports antibiotic trials. It tends to limit the types of trials that get funded. In addition, the availability of industry funding has resulted in the virtual absence of funding for antimicrobial trials in any of the other research funding sources in the United States, especially the National Institutes of Health. Prior to any clinical trials of a new antibiotic, a range of preclinical studies must be completed. The drug must be tested for in vitro antimicrobial activity against a wide variety of standard organisms to determine its antimicrobial spectrum. Organisms tested would include those from standard panels representing gram-positive and gram-negative species, aerobes, facultative anaerobes, and obligate anaerobes. Representative isolates from recent clinical infections would also be included. Minimal inhibitory concentrations (MICs) and minimal bactericidal concentrations (MBCs) would be determined and other characteristics such as the postantibiotic effect (PAE) and synergism, additive effect, or antagonism with other classes of antibiotics sought.

The widespread perception that the cozy relationship between physicians and the pharmaceutical industry leads to conflicts of interest has, among other things, prompted a crackdown in industry funding of continuing medical education (CME). The Association of American Medical Colleges adopted a zero

To the Editor, Miyazaki et al. [8] conducted a Medline search using various combinations of keywords, such as spinal fusion, bone morphogenetic protein, etc. Inclusion criteria for clinical studies were: studies that well describe the evaluating efficacy and rates of fusion by use of a particular material, surgical procedure and grafting technique, evaluation technique for fusion well described; number of patients more than ten. Grades of recommendation were done using Guyatt criteria [10]. However, we have to ask the authors a few clarifications related to inclusion of the studies of osteoinductive growth factors and gradation of recommendation for their use. Khan et al. [4] analyzing 100 original randomized clinical trials reported in 5 leading orthopedic journals over 2 years found strong and significant (P

The first step in responsible scholarship is reading the literature carefully; the second is accurately representing it. Huddle's (2010) piece does not reflect these scholarly steps; it simply make...

For six years UK Government and industry funding has supported two Loughborough University research teams working in areas related to assembly systems. Much of the funding is from the Science and Engineering Research Council's ACME (Application of Computers in Manufacturing Engineering) Directorate. A large part of the effort has focused on producing integrated assembly systems, using two approaches

TO THE EDITOR We thank Horn et al. (2012) for mentioning the Genetic Alliance, the Pseudoxanthoma Elasticum International Registry, and the National Psoriasis Foundation and providing Internet links to these registries in their letter regarding our commentary ‘‘Significance of Patient Registries for Dermatological Disorders’’ (de Souza and Miller, 2012). Table 1 in our commentary included a select number of registries and was not meant to be an exhaustive or all-inclusive list. With regard to the comment from Horn et al. (2012) that Table 1 erroneously lists industry funding for the Hereditary Angioedema Association (HAEA) registry, we listed the HAEA as the sponsor of the HAEA registry and noted that the HAEA receives funding from the industry sponsors listed in Table 1, as the HAEA lists these sponsors on their registry’s webpage. The Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Registry was mentioned as a gold standard because, as stated in the commentary, it has enrolled a large percentage (88%) of the estimated number of CF patients in the United States. The data from the CF Registry are easily accessible in annual reports published by the CF Foundation. It would be helpful if similar annual reports for the registries listed in Table 1 are made publicly available by their sponsors. This will facilitate the comparisons between the registries suggested by Horn et al. We thank Horn et al. (2012) at the Genetic Alliance, the National Psoriasis Foundation, and the Pachyonychia Congenita Project for their valuable contributions to patient advocacy and registries for dermatological and other disorders.

Executive SummaryPhilanthropy plays a major role in university-based scientific, engineering, and medical research in the United States, contributing over $4 billion annually to operations, endowment, and buildings devoted to research. When combined with endowment income, university research funding from science philanthropy is $7 billion a year. This major contribution to US scientific competitiveness comes from private foundations as well as gifts from individuals. From the researcher's perspective, analysis in this paper demonstrates that science philanthropy provides almost 30% of the annual research funds of those in leading universities. And yet science philanthropy has been largely overshadowed by the massive rise of federal research funding and, to a lesser extent, industry funding. Government and industry funding have drawn intensive analysis, partly because their objectives are measurable: governments generally support broad national goals and basic research, while industry finances projects likely to contribute directly to useful products. In contrast, philanthropy's contribution to overall levels of scientific funding and, more importantly, the distribution of philanthropy across different types of research are poorly understood. To fill this gap, I provide the first empirical evaluation of the role of science philanthropy in American research universities. The documented extent of science philanthropy and its strong emphasis on translational medical research raises important questions for federal policy makers. In determining their own funding strategies, they must no longer assume that their funding is the only source in shaping some fields of research while recognizing that philanthropy may ignore other important fields.

The paper “High reprint orders in medical journals and pharmaceutical industry funding: case-control study” by Adam E Handel and colleagues ( BMJ 2012;344:e4212). Abstract Objectives —To assess the extent to which funding and study design are associated with high reprint orders. Design —Case-control study. Setting —Top articles by size of reprint orders in seven journals, 2002-9. Participants — Lancet , Lancet Neurology , Lancet Oncology (Lancet Group), BMJ , Gut , Heart , and Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry (BMJ Group) matched to contemporaneous articles not in the list of high reprint orders. Main outcome measures —Funding and design of randomised controlled trials or other study designs. Results —Median reprint orders for the seven journals ranged from 3000 to 126 350. Papers with high reprint orders were more likely to be funded by the drug industry than were control papers (industry funding versus other or none: odds ratio 8.64, 95% confidence interval 5.09 to 14.68, and mixed funding versus other or none: 3.72, 2.43 to 5.70). Conclusions —Funding by the drug industry is associated with high numbers of reprint orders. The authors of this study set out to discover whether articles published in medical journals that had many reprints of the article purchased were more likely to be funded by the drug industry. (“Reprints” refers to purchased permission to reproduce journal articles in bulk, allowing the article to be distributed to a new audience. The money from reprint purchases is an important source of income for some journals). A second question in this study was whether those articles with high reprint orders were more likely to have a particular design. Articles published in medical journals, particularly the best known ones, can have considerable impact. A study showing a drug to be highly effective might, for instance, lead to a surge in …

Background: For the last two decades, the size of the literature that is based on the cost-effectiveness (CE) evaluations of pharmaceuticals has only been increasing, together with increasing sponsorship provided by manufacturing pharmaceutical industry. Objective: The current study attempted to analyze the CE literature, in terms of changing trends overtime as well as the potential influence that industry funding has on results in the CE evaluations in literature. Methods: Cancer drug-related literature was chosen as the target population of this study. Literature analyzed was that falling between 1991 and 2010, which was further divided into five blocks of 4-year periods for the purpose of description and analyses. Descriptive statistics and Chi-square tests were used to perform nonparametric statistics, with a p-value of

We thought that the headline on Roehr’s article was overly pessimistic.1 Tabas and colleagues’ study showed that most US doctors (83%) believed industry funding should be eliminated from accredited continuing medical education (CME) …

Prominent academic doctors and a medical students’ leader have criticised continuing medical education funded by industry at a hearing of the US Senate Special Subcommittee on Aging. However, a representative of the accrediting group defended its work. Murray Kopelow said that his group had recently put in place stronger guidelines on industry funding. The Senate committee’s hearing, chaired by Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat, on 29 July 2009, focused on conflicts of interest in the continuing medical education courses that most US doctors have to take. Industry funding for accredited continuing medical education increased from $302m (£180m; €210m) in 1998 to $1.2bn in 2006 and accounts for about half of the funding for continuing education. “Large corporations do not typically spend …

Conflicts of interest are common in research papers on cancer, and papers with conflicts are more likely to report positive results, say researchers at the University of Michigan ( Cancer 2009 May 11, doi:10.1002/cncr.24315). The study says that almost one in three of 1534 original papers in eight leading journals in 2006 had reported conflicts of interest, and 17% reported industry funding. In studies where the authors reported a conflict of interest, 29% of the patients who had received the intervention had improved survival rates, and in studies whose authors had no reported conflict of interest that figure was only 14%. Reshma Jagsi, an assistant professor of radiation oncology, and …

The board of trustees of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) decided last month to phase out symposiums sponsored by industry and meals at annual meetings. The board did not say when it would end events funded by industry, and the association’s president, Nada Stotland, said that industry sponsorship might continue through 2010 (www.medpagetoday.com, 26 Mar, “Psychiatry group plans phase-out of industry-sponsored symposia”). Dr Stotland said, “Although we took great care to avoid biased reporting at all our symposia, we came to the conclusion …

A report from the Association of American Medical Colleges suggests that all 129 member medical schools should prohibit pharmaceutical and devices manufacturers from providing gifts, food, and travel to doctors, faculty members, and students. The report will be considered at the association’s meeting in June. The association set up a task force to examine industry funding and to guide the association, medical schools, and teaching hospitals in …

A group of members of the European parliament with a special interest in breast cancer has cut its ties with a breast cancer advocacy group, Europa Donna, because of the group’s acceptance of financial support from drug companies. Karin Jons, chairman of the European parliamentary group on breast cancer (EPGBC), issued a press release last week announcing the decision, saying that 86% of Europa Donna’s income of about €424 000 (£330 000; $660 000) in 2007 came from the industry. “We at EPGBC reject further cooperation with Europa …

Introduction: The literature suggests that there is concern about the relationship between industry and doctors. Whilst industry sponsorship of education and research activities is highly valued, evidence suggests that promotional activities may influence doctors in ways that are not always beneficial to patients. The industry-doctor relationship must therefore be transparent and comply with ethical standards of the community to preserve professional integrity and maintain patients’ trust. The aims of this study are 1) to determine the opinions of patients on the ethics of various practical aspects of urologists’ relationship with industry; 2) to compare these opinions to those of urologists. Methods: A questionnaire comprising 22 aspects of the industry-urologist relationship was formulated. Approval was obtained from the hospital ethics unit to distribute the questionnaire to urology outpatients. The questionnaire was also given to patients at private practices of urologists, and distributed to urologists and trainees in Australia and New Zealand. Results: Over 200 questionnaires were returned for analysis. Urologists and their patients were found to hold very similar views on the ethics of the industry-urologist relationship. Whilst industry funding for education and research activities was generally looked upon favourably, other promotional activities and conditional funding were generally not approved of. Notably, there was also a wide variation of opinion amongst urologists on several specific aspects of the industry-urologist relationship. Conclusions: Australian and New Zealand urologists’ standard of ethics regarding their relationship with industry appears to be in line with that of their patients. Such concordance of opinion is desirable as it may help to preserve professional integrity and maintain patients’ trust.

To the Editor:—“The Corporate Co-author” (June, 2005 issue)1 brought national attention2 to what the JGIM editors accurately describe as “an egregious case of unethical behavior” by the pharmaceutical industry “in order to enhance corporate profits.” However, the article also raises concerns about ties between industry and medical societies that publish medical journals. One might reasonably ask, would an organization more dependent on industry funding have published the piece?

New guidelines issued by the Cochrane Collaboration prohibit industry funding of Cochrane reviews. The guidelines followed revelations that a drug company with a stake in a Cochrane review provided funding for the review ( BMJ 2003; 327: 924-6). Under the new rules, Cochrane review groups will not

A year long struggle over funding of the Cochrane Collaboration has been settled: a policy just issued by the organisation will limit industry funding. The collaboration is an international organisation that reviews health interventions and disseminates the information worldwide. James Neilson, who co-chairs the collaboration's steering group, said the policy reflects the overwhelming consensus of members that they want a “clear separation between production of reviews and commercial sponsorship.” Some Cochrane members opposed the move, saying the restrictions would threaten the financial viability of certain elements of the work of the Cochrane Collaboration which are currently sponsored by industry. “We're not sure about the impact,” said Dr …

EDITOR—Jorgensen and Gotzsche explored the relation between corporate funding and the presentation and dissemination of health information.1 As an organisation dedicated to providing a critical analysis of women's health issues, the National Women's Health Network recognises the important influence such funding can …

Fierce opposition to industry funding of Cochrane reviews has caused the organisation's leadership to draft a set of proposals that will, if accepted, further restrict commercial funding. The proposed policy will forbid for-profit companies to fund a Cochrane review if they have a “real or potential vested interest in the findings of the review.” It would additionally forbid commercial entities to fund the review groups themselves. The new proposals do not forbid industry sponsorship of other Cochrane entities, but suggest creating a “firewall” between commercial sources and review groups. Nor do they restrict funding by not—for—profit organisations. This is worrying some researchers as a “third party” strategy—in which industry funds or even creates not—for—profit professional or lay organisations that promote certain medicines—is increasingly being used by drug companies …

EDITOR—As the British umbrella organisation representing the interests of all people with skin diseases and their patients' groups, the Skin Care Campaign welcomed the balanced approach taken by Herxheimer in his article on the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and patients' organisations.1 However, we contest the argument that industry will if nothing else influence policy if it directly …

FINANCIAL TIES BETWEEN ACAdemic researchers and private industry are currently under intense scrutiny. About $1.5 billion from industry flows into academic institutions annually, and 1 study has shown that 28% of surveyed life sciences faculty report funding from private sponsors. There is growing concern among federal and state agencies and academic institutions that industry sponsorship may influence the outcomes of research and undermine traditionally held academic values of intellectual freedom, open exchange of ideas, and research in the interest of the public good. Such concerns are not without foundation. Several studies have shown an association between single-source sponsorship of clinical research and publication of results favoring the sponsor’s product; another study has shown that unfavorable results of economic analyses of oncology drugs are less likely to be reported when the study is funded by a pharmaceutical company. Faculty researchers receiving research support from industry are also more likely to restrict their communication with colleagues than faculty not receiving industry sponsorship, and many faculty who receive gifts from corporate sponsors are subject to prepublication review or data use restrictions. In addition to the effects that corporate sponsorship might have on design, outcome, or publication of results, concern exists that a growing number of faculty researchers also have personal financial relationships with the companies sponsoring their research. In 1996, Krimsky et al Author Affiliations: Center for Health Care Evaluation, Health Services Research and Development Program, Department of Veterans Affairs, Palo Alto, Calif (Dr Boyd); Institute for Health Policy Studies, School of Medicine (Drs Boyd and Bero), and Department of Clinical Pharmacy, School of Pharmacy (Dr Bero), University of California, San Francisco. Dr Bero serves as chair of the Chancellor’s Advisory Panel on Relations with Industry at the University of California, San Francisco, from September 1999 to present. Corresponding Author and Reprints: Lisa A. Bero, PhD, Department of Clinical Pharmacy and Institute for Health Policy Studies, University of California, San Francisco, 3333 California St, Suite 265, San Francisco, CA 94143-0936 (e-mail: bero@medicine.ucsf.edu). Context A growing number of academic researchers receive industry funding for clinical and basic research, but little is known about the personal financial relationships of researchers with their industry sponsors.

This issue of C&EN features our annual special report, "Facts & Figures for Chemical R&D," the most comprehensive compilation of statistics published by any magazine on the status of the chemical research and development effort in the U.S. and abroad. This special report and its companion report, "Facts & Figures for the Chemical Industry" (July 24, page 38), provide an extensive overview of the health of the chemical enterprise. Depending on your viewpoint, the R&D cup is either half full or half empty. C&EN has certainly done its share of hand-wringing in the past year about declining support for R&D. We've bemoaned more than once on this page the cutbacks by industry in R&D spending as a percentage of sales and the declining employment of chemists. And C&EN's reporters have covered almost every conference, study, and utterance examining the drop in federal and industry funding for R&D. But, in fact, nothing in life is black ...

Schemes to increase the mobility of researchers and increase industry funding for R&D are amongst the proposals being put to France's National Assembly by research minister Francois Fillon following his extensive and controversial national consultation on scientific research (Physics World May p6).