Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) believes that the timely dissemination of clinical trial data for public accessibility, improved enforcement deadlines for sharing results from clinical research studies, and the expansion of clinical trial registration will improve clinical practice and policy, prevent unnecessary research duplication, and help to inform present and future research.
Clinical trials are the best way we have of testing whether a medicine is safe and effective yet results from around half of all clinical trials remain hidden. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration Amendment Act of 2007 requires that clinical trials carried out in the United States on drugs licensed after 2009 should be registered online and results reported within a year of their end. An independent audit in 2012 found that a paltry 22% of trials complied with the law. This is simply unacceptable.
As the world’s first and leading AIDS service organization, we believe that access to clinical trials, past and present, is critical to ending the AIDS epidemic.
