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Family Practice Vol. 21, No. 4, 335-336
Family Practice Vol. 21, No. 4 © Oxford University Press 2004, all rights reserved.

Editorial

The commercialization of clinical research: who pays the piper, calls the tune?

Nick Freemantlea and Deborah Stockenb

a Department of Primary Care and General Practice and b Cancer Studies, University of Birmingham, UK

Correspondence to Nick Freemantle, PhD, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Department of Primary Care and General Practice, Primary Care Clinical Sciences Building, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK; E-mail: N.Freemantle@bham.ac.uk

Freemantle N and Stocken D. The commercialization of clinical research: who pays the piper, calls the tune? Family Practice 2004; 21: 335–336.

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Clinical research has become a massive global endeavour. Clinical trials are regularly conducted in many thousands of patients across multiple countries. "Most clinical studies that bring new drugs from bench to bedside are financed by pharmaceutical companies. Many of these drug trials are rigorously designed, employing the skills of outstanding clinical researchers at leading academic institutions."1 However, medical science is developed in a harsh commercial environment. As Backhouse, an economist working in the pharmaceutical industry, comments: "the design choices made in the planning of RCTs, such as which comparators to use, which endpoints to evaluate and which sample size to . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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