You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 5, Issue 11
  • Clinical trial registration, reporting, publication and FDAAA compliance: a cross-sectional analysis and ranking of new drugs approved by the FDA in 2012

Article Text

Article menu
XML
Ethics
Research
Clinical trial registration, reporting, publication and FDAAA compliance: a cross-sectional analysis and ranking of new drugs approved by the FDA in 2012
  1. Jennifer E Miller1,
  2. David Korn2,
  3. Joseph S Ross3,4,5
  1. 1NYU Langone Medical Center, NYU School of Medicine, Bioethics International, New York, New York, USA
  2. 2Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
  3. 3Section of General Internal Medicine and the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, Department of Internal Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
  4. 4Department of Health Policy and Management, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
  5. 5Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, Yale–New Haven Hospital, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Jennifer E Miller; jennifer.miller{at}nyumc.org

Abstract

Objective To evaluate clinical trial registration, reporting and publication rates for new drugs by: (1) legal requirements and (2) the ethical standard that all human subjects research should be publicly accessible to contribute to generalisable knowledge.

Design Cross-sectional analysis of all clinical trials submitted to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for drugs approved in 2012, sponsored by large biopharmaceutical companies.

Data sources Information from Drugs@FDA, ClinicalTrials.gov, MEDLINE-indexed journals and drug company communications.

Main outcome measures Clinical trial registration and results reporting in ClinicalTrials.gov, publication in the medical literature, and compliance with the 2007 FDA Amendments Acts (FDAAA), analysed on the drug level.

Results The FDA approved 15 drugs sponsored by 10 large companies in 2012. We identified 318 relevant trials involving 99 599 research participants. Per drug, a median of 57% (IQR 32–83%) of trials were registered, 20% (IQR 12–28%) reported results in ClinicalTrials.gov, 56% (IQR 41–83%) were published, and 65% (IQR 41–83%) were either published or reported results. Almost half of all reviewed drugs had at least one undisclosed phase II or III trial. Per drug, a median of 17% (IQR 8–20%) of trials supporting FDA approvals were subject to FDAAA mandated public disclosure; of these, a median of 67% (IQR 0–100%) were FDAAA-compliant. 68% of research participants (67 629 of 99 599) participated in FDAAA-subject trials, with 51% (33 405 of 67 629) enrolled in non-compliant trials. Transparency varied widely among companies.

Conclusions Trial disclosures for new drugs remain below legal and ethics standards, with wide variation in practices among drugs and their sponsors. Best practices are emerging. 2 of our 10 reviewed companies disclosed all trials and complied with legal disclosure requirements for their 2012 approved drugs. Ranking new drugs on transparency criteria may improve compliance with legal and ethics standards and the quality of medical knowledge.

  • MEDICAL ETHICS
  • PUBLIC HEALTH
  • GENERAL MEDICINE (see Internal Medicine)

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2015-009758

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Supplementary materials

    • Supplementary Data

      This web only file has been produced by the BMJ Publishing Group from an electronic file supplied by the author(s) and has not been edited for content.