Medical Journal Urges Curbs on Researcher Ties to Drug Firms
The New England Journal of Medicine, ranked as the most influential periodical of its kind in the world, today is calling for restricting the money that doctors and academic researchers get from drug companies and biotechnology firms, saying the growth of those financial ties creates conflicts of interest and threatens the quality of medical science.
In an editorial, the journal’s editor in chief, Dr. Marcia Angell, charged that the “business goals of industry influence the mission of medical schools” because the boundaries between industry and academic medicine are now blurry.
To restore integrity, Angell said, medical schools should ban faculty researchers from receiving lucrative speaking fees and stocks from companies that market products being studied. Also, she said, doctors should stop accepting gifts from drug companies.
The same issue of the journal carries an essay by a UC San Francisco professor analyzing evidence that researchers getting funding from a company are biased toward viewing its products favorably, contrary to industry claims.
The journal itself has lately been at the center of controversies over financial conflicts of interest.
Last February, it admitted to violations of its own ethics policy, saying that an internal audit found 19 drug therapy review articles published since 1997 that were written by authors with undisclosed financial ties to the drugs’ makers. The audit was prompted by articles in The Times last fall.
One of those authors was named last week as the journal’s new editor, to start later this year. Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, an asthma specialist at Harvard, had disclosed his company ties to the journal before it published his article. As editor, he said he would recuse himself from evaluating articles that discuss products from any of the nine companies that have funded his research or paid him.
Last year, the 188-year-old journal’s publisher, the Massachusetts Medical Society, fired Editor in Chief Jerome Kassirer because he balked at plans to leverage the journal’s name and logo to promote other products.
Finally, today’s issue carries a study of depression treatments written by researchers with so many ties to drug companies that the printed edition did not have room for all the affiliations and posted them on its Web site.
