Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly is going to share some of its past clinical trial data with independent researchers. Scientists will be able to submit research proposals to an independent panel to request access to anonymised individual patient data. Lilly plans to include data from clinical trials used as part of the approval process for medicines in the US since 1999 and all clinical trials on Lilly’s licensed medicines since 2007. This is a good first step for Lilly but it is not all the information Lilly has, for example, they are not sharing data from trials before 2007 that were not used for approval for medicines in the USA.
Lilly is the sixth pharmaceutical company to join ClinicalStudyDataRequest.com, which was created by GSK last year. The website already includes data from Boehringer Ingelheim, Novartis, Roche and ViiV Healthcare, each of whom have committed to sharing different amounts of data through the site. It remains to be seen how requests for data to ClinicalStudyDataRequest.com will be handled.