Clinical trials that are actually marketing ploys targeting doctors – how seeding trials put profit over patients

Some clinical trials aren’t designed to answer scientific questions. They’re designed to market drugs. In our recently published research, my team and I analyzed over 34,000 industry-funded trials and found that hundreds of studies across seven medical fields were likely designed to promote a drug to physicians rather than to generate scientific data. For some fields, nearly 1% of clinical trials were for marketing purposes. Known as seeding trials, these studies prioritize marketing over science while disguising their commercial purpose as legitimate research. Pharmaceutical companies use them to familiarize physicians with new products under the guise of data collection. Participants sign consent forms, believing they are contributing to medical knowledge. In reality, patients are absorbing risks that serve corporate interests rather than resolving genuine uncertainty about the therapeutic potential of a drug. The term seeding trial first entered the medical literature in 1994, when then-commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration David Kessler and his colleagues described such studies as attempts to entice doctors to prescribe new drugs through trials that appear to serve little scientific purpose. Three decades later, the problem of seeding trials persists. How seeding trials work While the structure of a seeding trial looks similar to…

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