New Law on Clinical Trials – More Transparency Please

I heard a powerful case recently for access to all clinical trial results. The case was made by Professor Peter C. Gøtzsche, leader of the Nordic Cochrane Collaboration in Copenhagen and one of those whose complaint to the European Ombudsman has led to major improvements in transparency in the European Medicines Agency.

The occasion was a seminar in the European Parliament on the EU Horizon 2020 Research Programme, organised by Health Action International (HAI) and the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) – of which I am proud to say I was one of the founding members in 1998...

Access to clinical trial data, or data sharing, would mean that the results (positive or negative) of all clinical trials would be published, and that the (anonymised) raw data from all trials would be openly available to other researchers, together with the protocols (purpose, objectives, methodology etc) for each trial...