The UK’s House of Commons health select committee is planning to look into the sharing of clinical trial data in the pharmaceutical industry.
Health select committee chairman Stephen Dorrell told the NHS Alliance conference in Bournemouth on 22 November that addressing unpublished data was a major priority.
UK pharma companies are not currently required to reveal full clinical trial results, which could be causing doctors to make medical decisions without sufficient information, according to advocates of clinical data reform.
Dorrell would not give any firm information on when the investigation would take place, saying there needed to be more discussion within the committee before that decision could be made.
In a debate at the conference, UK MP Dr Sarah Wollaston said the government should be more cautious about how it purchases drugs, according to gponline.com.
"For far too long now we have allowed the government to buy drugs at vast expense… without actually knowing all of the clinical trial data and I think that’s totally unacceptable," Wollaston said.
The British Medical Journal (BMJ) is running an open data campaign for the independent scrutiny of data from clinical trials, and to highlight the problems caused by inaccessible data.
The campaign’s first initiative has been to access the full data set on Tamiflu, Roche’s anti-flu drug, to address concerns about its efficacy and safety.
"Roche complies with all legal requirements regarding the publication of data and does not generally make patient level data available due to legal and confidentiality constraints," Roche said in a reactive statement to the BMJ’s campaign in October 2012.
