5th February 2013
We are pleased to sign up to the AllTrials campaign for clinical trial transparency and support its call for the registration of clinical trials and the disclosure of clinical trial results and clinical study reports (CSRs).
At GSK, we are committed to being transparent with our clinical trial data to help advance scientific understanding and inform medical judgment. We already publicly disclose a significant amount of information about our clinical trials. We register and post summary information about each trial we begin and share the results of all our clinical trials – whether positive or negative – on a website accessible to all. Today this website includes almost 5,000 clinical trial result summaries and receives an average of almost 11,000 visitors each month. We have also previously committed to seek publication of the results of all of our clinical trials that evaluate our medicines to peer-reviewed scientific journals.
Expanding on this, we have committed to make CSRs publicly available through our clinical trials register. From now, we will publish CSRs for all of our medicines once they have been approved or discontinued from development and the results have been published. This is to allow for the data to be first reviewed by regulators and the scientific community. Patient data in the CSRs and their appendices will be removed to ensure patient confidentiality is maintained.
In addition, while there are practical challenges, we also intend to publish CSRs for clinical outcomes trials for all approved medicines dating back to the formation of GSK. This will require retrieval and examination of each historic CSR to remove confidential patient information. Given the significant volume of studies involved, we will put in place a dedicated team to conduct this work which we expect to complete over a number of years. Posting will take place in a step-wise manner, with priority given to CSRs for its most commonly prescribed medicines.
Separately, we are also working to develop a system where researchers will be able request access to detailed anonymised patient level data that sit behind the results of our clinical trials to enable additional scientific inquiry and analyses to help further scientific knowledge.
Press coverage:
Reuters: GSK promises to publish detailed drug trial data
The Guardian: GlaxoSmithKline to publish clinical trial data
The Independent: GSK to publish clinical trial data for drugs
The Times (£): Victory for The Times as drug firm vows to publish drug test data