Drug studies financed by pharmaceutical companies frequently show positive results in favor of the sponsor, says a research group headed by the Chairman of the Drug Commission of the German Medical Association in the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2010; 107(16): 279-85).
Prof. Wolf-Dieter Ludwig and colleagues describe the influence of sponsoring on the results, protocol and quality of drugs studies and conclude that pharmaceutical companies exploit a wide variety of possibilities of manipulating study results.
Apart from financing the study, financial links to the authors, such as payments for lectures, may tend to make the results of the study more favorable for the company. Not only the results themselves, but also their interpretation, are significantly more often in accordance with the wishes of the sponsor.
In some publications, the authors detected evidence that sponsors from the pharmaceutical industry had influenced study protocols. For example, placebos were more frequently used in drug studies than was the case with independently financed studies. Also, some favorable effects were linked to financial support from the pharmaceutical industry.
But other criticisms as evidence of industry influence are less notable; limitations on publication rights for example, are no different than Science and Nature magazines.
But they say the methodological quality of studies with industrial support tended to be better than with government-funded drug studies. Obviously 'independent' is a subjective term.
The question would need to be are corporate-funded researchers less ethical, according to Ludwig? And are government-funded researchers free of funding bias even though they know they need to show some success if they are going to get grants renewed?