Grassley News
Floor Statement on Proposed Budget Resolutions and Senate Leadership... Read More >>
Grassley: Drug Trafficking in West Africa Fuels Instability... Read More >>
Disclosure of Federal Drug Research Money is a No-brainer
It’s a no-brainer that we all benefit from prescription drugs. It’s also well-known that the research and development of blockbuster medicine is expensive. Private drug companies pay for it, and the federal taxpayers pay for it. With billions of dollars in the mix, potential conflicts of interest are inevitable. My congressional oversight work found one prominent doctor who owned part of a drug company while using a federal research grant to study a drug owned by that company. Arguably, that doctor had a personal interest in getting that drug on the market. His medical research might have been biased.
We’d all like the assurance that the medicine we ingest was developed free of financial bias. One of the most effective tools toward weeding out potential conflicts of interest is transparency. Since money is a fact of life in drug development, disclosing who gets what money from what source is a check on any potential conflicts of interest. A university can remove a potentially conflicted doctor from a federal research grant, but it can’t stop what it doesn’t know.
That’s why it was disappointing to learn of a key federal agency’s plan to dilute a long-awaited transparency rule that would help disclose the financial ties between the medical researchers who receive billions of dollars in federal funding and the pharmaceutical industry.
The Office of Management and Budget reportedly is removing the requirement in the proposed rule for a publicly available website that would publish the outside financial interests of researchers funded by taxpayers. Proposed in May 2010, the rule would cover grants from the National Institutes of Health, which is the primary means of federal funding of medical research at universities and large medical centers. The President’s proposed budget for the National Institutes of Health for 2012 is $32 billion, with about 83 percent dedicated for research around the country.
The academic lobbies reportedly are arguing that an online requirement would be a lot of work for them and of little practical value to the public. That strikes me as a weak argument. These universities accept billions of tax dollars for research. It’s hard to see why they can’t do their part to inform the public.
This week, I wrote to the Office of Management and Budget and urged it to keep the online requirement as is. The public’s business ought to be public. Transparency is a backstop against research that’s compromised by doctors’ self-interest, to the detriment of consumers. Backsliding on transparency would undermine the good work done in recent years to shine a light on these financial relationships. If the online requirement is gone, it will be much harder for the public to see and use the information. Without public scrutiny, we’d lose a valuable layer of oversight.
Friday, Aug. 5, 2011
It’s a no-brainer that we all benefit from prescription drugs. It’s also well-known that the research and development of blockbuster medicine is expensive. Private drug companies pay for it, and the federal taxpayers pay for it. With billions of dollars in the mix, potential conflicts of interest are inevitable. My congressional oversight work found one prominent doctor who owned part of a drug company while using a federal research grant to study a drug owned by that company. Arguably, that doctor had a personal interest in getting that drug on the market. His medical research might have been biased.
We’d all like the assurance that the medicine we ingest was developed free of financial bias. One of the most effective tools toward weeding out potential conflicts of interest is transparency. Since money is a fact of life in drug development, disclosing who gets what money from what source is a check on any potential conflicts of interest. A university can remove a potentially conflicted doctor from a federal research grant, but it can’t stop what it doesn’t know.
That’s why it was disappointing to learn of a key federal agency’s plan to dilute a long-awaited transparency rule that would help disclose the financial ties between the medical researchers who receive billions of dollars in federal funding and the pharmaceutical industry.
The Office of Management and Budget reportedly is removing the requirement in the proposed rule for a publicly available website that would publish the outside financial interests of researchers funded by taxpayers. Proposed in May 2010, the rule would cover grants from the National Institutes of Health, which is the primary means of federal funding of medical research at universities and large medical centers. The President’s proposed budget for the National Institutes of Health for 2012 is $32 billion, with about 83 percent dedicated for research around the country.
The academic lobbies reportedly are arguing that an online requirement would be a lot of work for them and of little practical value to the public. That strikes me as a weak argument. These universities accept billions of tax dollars for research. It’s hard to see why they can’t do their part to inform the public.
This week, I wrote to the Office of Management and Budget and urged it to keep the online requirement as is. The public’s business ought to be public. Transparency is a backstop against research that’s compromised by doctors’ self-interest, to the detriment of consumers. Backsliding on transparency would undermine the good work done in recent years to shine a light on these financial relationships. If the online requirement is gone, it will be much harder for the public to see and use the information. Without public scrutiny, we’d lose a valuable layer of oversight.
Friday, Aug. 5, 2011