Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15627
Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.
Publication type: news
Goozner M.
Are Conflicts of Interest in Cancer Clinical Research the Real Problem?
GoozNews 2009 May 12
http://www.gooznews.com/node/2918
Full text:
A new study in the journal Cancer suggests industry-funded clinical trials testing new chemotherapy regimens are more likely to show positive results than independently-funded trials. Nothing new there. Every study in every field that has ever been done on this subject has demonstrated what should be called the “industry-funding effect.”
But here’s the part that grabbed me:
Among 52 randomized, controlled trials with no conflict of interest, 14% found significantly better survival with the intervention relative to control, 72% found equivalent survival, and 6% significantly favored the control.
In 72 similar trials with a conflict of interest, 29% found in favor of the intervention, 61% showed no difference, and none reported better survival with the control.
In other words, fewer than one in four trials testing new approaches to cancer show benefit. Now, I’m no statistical maven, but I once read that if one takes a large sample of studies based on plausible hypotheses where the outcome is truly in doubt, the results over time would even out around 50-50. In other words, about half the plausible hypotheses will pan out, and about half will fail.
This statistical fact of life is one possible explanation for the industry-funding effect. While independent researchers are likely to develop hypotheses with an open mind (and less investment in the outcome), research managers inside companies only invest in research that has a good probability (at least in their eyes) of succeeding. Inside drug company R&D departments, this is called the “go-no go” decision.
What we have here, though, is an entire field that has a less than 25 percent success rate. What that tells me is that cancer research suffers not from too much industry funding, but from a paucity of plausible hypotheses.
