Pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb has announced it will provide access to data from its clinical trials since January 2008 to Duke University’s Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI). Independent researchers will be able to request access to the clinical trial data by submitting a research proposal to a review committee run by the DCRI. The data being made available include protocols, full clinical study reports and anonymised individual patient data from clinical trials on medicines approved in the US or Europe. Data will also be available from trials from cancelled drug programmes two years after they have been stopped.
Bristol-Myers Squibb also announced that it will publish summaries of clinical study reports on its website for trials that are used in support of approval for medicines in the US and Europe. People will also be able to request lay summaries of the clinical trials they participated in but the company has not promised to share this information publicly.
Pharmaceutical companies are realising that the era of secrecy is over. Bristol-Myers Squibb’s announcement is the latest example – earlier this year Johnson & Johnson released all of its clinical trial data to Yale University and companies including GSK, Eli-Lilly and Boehringer-Ingelheim have begun sharing their data through ClinicalStudyDataRequest.com.
The AllTrials campaign, your voice speaking out on social media and organisations joining up are putting some pressure on companies and academic trialists to commit to clinical trial transparency. We need more of this pressure. Share this story on Facebook and Twitter and tell more people to sign the AllTrials petition.