By Merith Basey | Executive Director, UAEM North America
We are pleased to share that in late March UAEM North America, in partnership with TranspariMED, released a critical analysis of U.S. universities’ continued failure to ensure public transparency of the results of their clinical research. In analyzing university compliance with a federal research transparency law, UAEM learned that only 15 of the 40 universities studied were in full compliance and that data for over 30% of trials was still missing. Failure to report clinical trial results in a timely manner has substantial negative consequences for patients and public health, and the significance of the findings was reinforced by media coverage of the release in major outlets including STAT, Nature (the world’s leading science and technology publication), and Endpoints News.
In response to the report and UAEM's broader campaign to urge leading universities to become the first academic research institutions in the world to sign onto the World Health Organisation (WHO)’s Joint Statement on Clinical Trial Transparency, Director-General of the WHO Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated, “We advocate full transparency of which clinical trials are ongoing and ensuring all results are disclosed in a timely manner. This is consistent with the principal goal of medical research: to serve the betterment of humanity. In the case of clinical trials, full transparency on results advances both scientific understanding and timelines for product development and ultimately enables access to essential medicines. We would welcome Universities joining as signatories”.
Immediately after the launch of our report we learned that several of the worst-performing universities called out scrambled to put their clinical trial data into the public domain where it belonged. This is a significant win for student advocacy! Further, some of the leading universities who were 100% compliant are now engaged with our student campaign team taking steps to consider if they can out-do their peers and be the first academic instiutions in the world to sign onto the WHO Statement for clinical trial transparency!
We urge you to explore the data and our microsite linked below to learn how these leading instutions could go further to protect the public and better safeguard access to medicines for the public good!
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
