Posted by seldomseen on October 5, 2008, at 9:50:52
In reply to Nemeroff Failed to Report PharmCos' Compensations, posted by jrbecker76 on October 4, 2008, at 20:54:18
While this example may be a bit outlandish, I do want to point out that cooperation between pharma and academia is typically a very productive and beneficial one.
University medical centers provide the patient population and clinical trial resources that drive the studies that evaluate drugs. Pharma has the resources for large scale research and development, scale up and distribution.
If a drug company runs a clinical trial at an NIH funded university/medical center, both the investigator AND the university get monies to run the trial.
Universities just can't run these trials for free and there has to be a principal investigator at the site. The universities incur significant expense to run these trials for companies and this cost should be offset.
Because the NIH has a "percent effort" requirement for grants, the investigator themselves often can not apply for NIH monies because of the time required to run the trials.
It's a catch-22. Yes, there can be an appearance of impropriety, but without it the pipeline for drugs would get smaller and slower.
When people look at the amount of money changing hands there is an immediate cry of "conflict of interest!" but usually, it is just a case of cooperation that drives discovery and there are real world costs associated with it.
On a side note, if a company invites an "academic" to speak at a conference/meeting that speaker is paid an honorarium and travel expenses. That honorarium is counted as income even though the speaker is usually just presenting their findings which may or may NOT have been funded by the company.Just my two cents.
Seldom.
poster:seldomseen
thread:855794
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20080926/msgs/855838.html