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Many US faculty members on institutional review boards have ties with industry

New York Janice Hopkins Tanne

A study of US medical schools’ faculty members serving on institutional review boards found that industry funding is common. About half of review board members are faculty members and about half of these have industry ties (Academic Medicine 2003;78:1-6)

The boards aim to protect patients in clinical research studies by reviewing the protocols before a study begins, approving changes in an ongoing study, and responding to reports of adverse events.

"Industry funding is part of the modern scientific enterprise. It’s a fact of life. Universities should manage [the relationships] to guard against risks and realise benefits. We don’t know the effect. We don’t know whether it’s bad," lead author Dr Eric Campbell told the BMJ. He said that research expertise is valuable for participants on review boards.

Dr Campbell is assistant professor in medicine (health policy) at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. He and colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School did a postal survey of a random sample of faculty members and reported results from the 66.5% who responded—4694 faculty members at the 121 four-year medical schools in the United States (excluding Puerto Rico). The researchers found that "about half (47%) of all faculty institution review board members had served as consultants to industry in the three years before our study."

Members of these boards were similar to other medical school faculty members, except for race and ethnicity. Under-represented minorities—non-Hispanic African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans—were 3.2 times more likely than white faculty members to serve on a review board. Most US medical schools allow faculty members to consult for industry one day a week..

"In recent years, numerous reports have criticised institutional review boards for failing to adequately protect human subjects," the authors write, noting that the US Department of Health and Human Services said many review boards lack research expertise (New England Journal of Medicine 2002;346:1405-8).

Industry ties and service on a review board may mean that researchers can sabotage studies by other investigators or "kidnap" pools of patients with rare disorders to serve their own research interests. Industry ties may limit researchers’ access to data gathered in multicentre studies, may require delayed publication, or may restrict information because of trade secrets, the authors say.

Dr Donna Shalala, former federal secretary of health and human services, and Dr Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, wrote in that journal a few years ago that conflicts of interest may have undermined integrity (2000;342:1516-8 and 2000;343:808-10;). Another study published in the same journal found that insufficient attention was paid to issues of race and ethnicity in HIV studies (2002;346:1373-82).

Race is a sensitive issue in the United States, where from 1932 to 1972 doctors in the Tuskegee study did not treat African-American men who had syphilis, even after antibiotics became available.
 
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Rapid Responses:

Read all Rapid Responses

Which Master Do They Serve?

Deborah j Wood
bmj.com, 22 Aug 2003 [Full text]

IRB ties to industry

Eileen McGinn
bmj.com, 11 Sep 2003 [Full text]