DRUG GIANTS WARNED - TELL TRUTH ON MEDICINES (INDEPENDENT)
The drug industry's long and ignoble history of secrecy
Leading article: The nation should kick this expensive drug habit By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
The pharmaceutical industry came under assault from senior figures in medical research yesterday over its practice of withholding information to protect profits, exposing patients to drugs which could be useless or harmful.
Experts criticised the stranglehold exerted by multinational companies over clinical trials, which has led to biased results, under-reporting of negative findings and selective publication driven by the market, which was worth £10.1bn in the UK in 2006, amounting to 11 per cent of total NHS costs.
The latest attack was triggered yesterday by an analysis of published and unpublished trials of modern antidepressants, including Prozac and Seroxat, showing they offer no clinically significant improvement over placebos (dummy pills) in most patients. But doctors said patients on the drugs should not stop taking them without consulting their GPs.
It was the first time researchers from the UK, Canada and the US had successfully used freedom of information legislation to obtain all the data presented to regulators when the companies applied to license their drugs.
In some cases it had not been made public for 20 years.
Over the past two decades the drugs, known as selective serotonin re- uptake inhibitors (SSRIs), have been among the biggest selling of all time, earning billions of pounds for their makers. Yesterday's finding suggests that the money may have been misspent. Drug companies are required by law to provide all data on a drug, published and unpublished, to the regulatory authorities when applying for a licence. But this requirement does not apply to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), which assesses cost effectiveness and recommends which drugs should be used by the NHS.
Peter Littlejohns, the clinical and public health director of Nice, said: "The regulatory authorities have access to everything.
Obviously we have access to the published data and we do ask the industry for unpublished data, but it is up to the companies whether to deliver it or not. We have no power to demand it.
The issue is that it relies on the good will of the industry."
Professor Mike Clarke, the director of the UK Cochrane Centre, an international collaboration between researchers in 100 countries which has published more than 3,000 systematic reviews of published trials to establish best medical practice, said lack of co-operation from the drug industry was damaging medical care.
"When we ask for details of a trial the company might tell us nothing.
We have even less power than Nice. Researchers trying to make sense of trials for decision-makers need to have access to this data.
If we have only got access to half of the data, when we see evidence that a drug works we don't know whether to believe it or not.
"It makes us doubtful that's the big worry. The companies are in the business of making profits but they are also in the business of providing safe, effective health care."