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So far senseaboutscience has created 109 blog entries.

MHRA shreds clinical trial info after 15 years

The UK medicines regulator destroys detailed information on the benefits and harms of medicines it has approved after it has held it for 15 years. This means that for medicines which have been on the market for longer than 15 years, which is the majority of them, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) […]

24th March 2014|

Russian translation of the AllTrials plan is now available

There is now a Russian translation of the AllTrials statement thanks to one of our supporters.

The document sets out four levels of information in clinical trial reporting and discusses the first three in detail:

knowledge that a trial has been conducted, from a clinical trials register
a brief summary of the trial’s results
full details about the trial’s […]

3rd February 2014|

Irish Medical Organisation calls for transparency

The Irish Medical Organisation has joined our campaign and has issued a strong call to “all research ethics committees and pharmaceutical companies in Ireland mandate the publishing of all clinical trial data, as part of receiving ethical approval.”

Read more in the Irish Medical Independent

30th January 2014|

Johnson & Johnson gives clinical trial data to researchers: a “game changer”

Johnson & Johnson (J&J) has decided to give all the data from pharmaceutical clinical trials it holds to researchers at Yale University. It is giving the anonymised patient data from its pharmaceutical arm Janssen to researchers at the Yale University Open Data Access (YODA) project and YODA will give access to the data to other […]

30th January 2014|

AllTrials campaign video coming soon

In the year since the launch of the AllTrials campaign over 63,000 people have signed the petition and 445 organisations have joined up; MEPs told us that our supporters’ input shaped the new European clinical trials law; and companies, research funders and regulators are having serious discussions about how to implement necessary changes to increase […]

27th January 2014|

One last hurdle remaining in clinical trial reform in Europe – how you can help

The new clinical trial regulation has been approved by Public Health Committee MEPs in Brussels. This means it is one step away from final agreement.

The regulation would require anyone running a clinical trial to register it and publish a summary of results in a publicly accessible EU database. Full Clinical Study Reports are expected to […]

24th January 2014|

BMJ editorial suggests a routine audit of clinical trials

A recent editorial by Dr Ben Goldacre and Prof Carl Heneghan in the BMJ calls for a routine audit of all currently used medical treatments. This audit would aim to identify if the treatment’s clinical trials were registered, what trial and research data is available, which investigators were involved in their R&D and what company manufactured […]

22nd January 2014|

The Lancet investigates waste in medical research

The Lancet released a 5-part series of reports this week on how to reduce waste in medical research caused by unpublished, unusable or incomplete reporting. Authors of the article by Chan et al say: “When full information about studies is inaccessible, billions of dollars in investment are wasted, bias is introduced, and research and care […]

16th January 2014|

Nature editorial advises “data sharing will pay dividends”

Nature published an editorial this week reminding pharmaceutical companies of the power of an informed public.

The pharmaceutical industry plays an important role in safeguarding public health. However, this should not make them complacent. Lessons can be learned from the current energy crisis and the banking crisis before it: public opinion matters.

The article states “…concern over […]

14th January 2014|

Bias in reporting of breast cancer clinical trials

Researchers have shown that there is significant bias in the reporting of breast cancer clinical trials. The group investigated randomised, controlled Phase III clinical trials with over 200 participants between 1995 and 2011. They looked at how the toxicity (side effects) of the drug and the primary end points (main purpose of the drug) were […]

10th January 2014|