Academics often exaggerate research – is this a surprise?

In Australia today, we hear a lot about healthcare companies, particularly those that develop pharmaceuticals. Little of what we hear is good news. While the ‘breakthroughs’ are attributed to researchers and hospitals, the companies that fund and support the work get all the attention when something goes wrong – or when people behave less than ethically.

Having worked in both the academic and commercial R+D sectors, my experience has been that academics are more likely to skew results. I believe this is the case for a whole variety of reasons, including a lack of good oversight, funding pressures, and publishing success being too closely linked to career progression.

Now there is some evidence to support my gut feeling.

A study in the Annals of Internal Medicine looks at press releases that academic medical centers send out about their research. They concluded that of 200 releases studied, 29 percent exaggerated their findings.

I’ve not read the study in detail, so won’t comment any further. It is reported in the WSJ Health blog.

Open-source Research?

Fiercebioresearcher recently quoted an article citing University of Toronto biochemist Aled Edwards.

He says there are 600,000 scientists around the world engaged in developing new drugs. And they spawn about 20 new therapies each year. That means that it now takes 30,000 lab-years to produce a single new drug at a cost of billions of dollars. The entire process is marked by secrecy and it is increasingly inefficient and wasteful.
“For the last 30 years, the drug industry has less and less productive measured by dollars in and drugs out,” he says.

This comes soon after gradual, but several significant and recent moves by various big Pharma to open their development pipelines to public scrutiny.

Edward maintains it would be far better if academic researchers and private developers worked in tandem, and in public. Rather than have four companies devote isolated teams of developers to the same task, with each facing a high risk of failure, they should work together to improve their odds. His three-lab consortium plans to take the lead by engaging entirely in open-source drug research work.

This approach is laudable but many at the business end of the pharma industry would question how economically viable it is. There is a desperate need then for someone to develop a model whereby a scientist, or companies, contribution to any open-network is somehow rewarded or we seek losing the profitability that has been such a powerful motivator for technology development to date.