A multi-national study led by Australia’s Flinders University has found that more than 50 percent of the clinical trials the U.S. Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) used to approve anti-cancer medications over the past decade are not available for public scrutiny.
This comes after the pharmaceutical industry made a commitment in 2014 to improve data transparency.
Authors of the study say that commitment needs revisiting as it was supposed to be about restoring confidence in evidence-based medicine and allowing data to be used for further research into medicine safety and efficacy.
The team looked at what proportion of clinical trials that led to the registration of anti-cancer drugs were eligible for sharing with qualified researchers, revealing that of the 304 trials which underpinned the registration of 115 anti-cancer medications over the past ten years, only 136 had individual patient data available….