When the Food and Drug Administration creates an advisory committee to help it decide whether to approve drugs, it often asks academic physicians to serve on the committee as external experts…
A study by Genevieve Pham-Kanter published in The Milbank Quarterly concluded:
“There appears to be a pro-sponsor voting bias among advisory committee members who have exclusive financial relationships with the sponsoring firm but not among members who have non-exclusive financial relation-ships (ie, those with ties to both the sponsor and its competitors). These findings point to important heterogeneities in financial ties and suggest that policy-makers will need to be nuanced in their management of financial relationships of FDA advisory committee members“.
Sources and More Information:
- Revisiting Financial Conflicts of Interest in FDA Advisory Committees,
Wiley Online Library, DOI: 10.1111/1468-0009.12073, 9 SEP 2014. - Doctors’ Magical Thinking About Conflicts of Interest, TheNewYorkTimes,Aaron E. Carroll, SEPT. 8, 2014.