Doctors body joins AllTrials
pharmafile | March 18, 2013 | News story | Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing | alltrials, faculty
The Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine has signed up to AllTrials in the latest boost for the campaign for greater trial data transparency.
Part of the Royal Colleges of Physicians of the UK, the professional membership body sets standards for, and examines clinicians in, pharma medicine.
AllTrials is calling for clinical trials to be registered and the disclosure of their results plus clinical study reports (CSRs) to help improve transparency and aid research.
Dismissed by the ABPI as a ‘PR-driven initiative’, it has attracted a number of well-respected groups, charities and companies to date.
Chief among these is GlaxoSmithKline, whose support is a huge coup for AllTrials, but NICE has also signed up, as has the Wellcome Trust, the Royal Society for Medicine and British Pharmacological Society.
In adding its own support, the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine insists there is significant common ground between its own aims and those of AllTrials.
In a statement it said: “The Faculty has shown a longstanding commitment to the publication and dissemination of trial data through our Guiding Principles for Pharmaceutical Physicians, and we see the aims of the AllTrials campaign as being closely aligned to this commitment.”
All studies should be performed to increase knowledge in some useful way, and there should be openness and honesty in the sharing of this knowledge with the wider world, it went on.
“Study findings need to be communicated, whatever the outcome, for the benefit of the community at large,” it added.
The statement concluded: “We believe that the increased scrutiny of clinical trial data will result in enhanced and more rigorous science, and will ultimately lead to better health outcomes for patients.”
When GSK announced its decision, the ABPI insisted: “The decision to sign up to the Alltrials campaign is one for individual companies to make.”
The European Medicines Agency is working on how it will release clinical trial data from next year and reports from its working parties are expected next month. However, European pharma trade body EFPIA has already said it is against what it calls ‘indiscriminate’ transparency.
Adam Hill
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