NEW YORK -- The scramble for profit warps the way scientists and universities conduct medical experiments, undermining the integrity of research, said Yale University investigators who studied the impact of commercial funding on science.
One-quarter of the biomedical researchers at universities had commercial ties serious enough to raise questions of financial conflict, the analysts found. In many cases, it was enough to skew their research.
Moreover, the universities expected to police the integrity and ethics of faculty scientists have their own commercial research interests and financial conflicts. At least two-thirds of the universities also were involved in commercial ventures, holding equity shares in start-up companies whose research they were also expected to monitor. Twenty-seven universities had equity in 10 or more start-up companies, the researchers said.
The result can be slanted science.
Industry-sponsored research is 3.6 times more likely to produce results favorable to the company that helped pay for it, the Yale researchers determined in a university-funded study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.
"Medical research is a matter of life and death," said Yale University medical analyst Justin Bekelman, who led the study team. "The guidance patients receive from their doctors relies on valid scientific research."
In all, the Yale researchers assembled and analyzed data from 37 previously published peer-reviewed studies -- covering hundreds of research projects, thousands of scientists, and more than 1,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers -- on the extent, impact and management of financial conflicts.
They named no scientists or schools involved, nor did they reveal the names of any firms. Conducting the most extensive study of commercialism and science so far, they did identify a troubling trend across the realm of biomedical research.
Their review covered the decades from 1980 to 2000, a period during which the share of commercial funding grew to 62% of all U.S. spending on biomedical research. Even as public spending on biomedical research doubled in the last five years, the financial ties between academic scientists, universities and industry became more common and more likely than ever to influence research findings.
"Financial conflicts were even more prevalent among institutions than among individuals," said Yale research analyst Cary Gross. "How workable is oversight and the policing of financial conflicts by institutions if they themselves have conflicts?"
