Development of New Drugs

Re “The Rising Health Costs of Capitalism’s Invasion of the Science Lab,” Opinion, Dec. 20: Linda Marsa carpet-bombs an essential and hugely beneficial national resource instead of mounting a surgical strike on a limited problem. The formation and success of a high-technology corporate community, whether in chemicals, pharmaceuticals, electronics, information processing or any other research-intensive field, requires input from the academic establishment. About 1,500 biotechnology companies have been started through such interactions. They represent the only practical mechanism to commercialize discoveries made in academic laboratories, and to emphasize important current problems. Marsa makes much of the fact that academic scientists can be “tainted by corporate dollars.” But scientific fraud is a danger that has always existed.

She repeatedly expresses reservations about the validity of results of clinical trials of new medicines by academicians. Yet there is virtually no other venue for large-scale clinical trials. Pharmaceutical companies must rely on large university and institutional hospitals for patient recruitment.

There is opportunity for bias in expressing the results of any research, clinical or otherwise, and the possibility that academic investigators can be influenced in an improper direction by industrial funding cannot be ignored. The control of this problem lies not in discouraging academic-industrial research relationships, but in a more stringent peer-review process for monitoring the conduct of both academic and industrial research activities and the publications that arise from them.

MANFRED E. WOLFF PhD.

Laguna Beach