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Disappointing Cancer Study Results Go Unreported
An anonymous reader writes "Science News reports on a new study showing that most cancer drug trial results are never published, probably leaving patients vulnerable to cocktails that have already been shown to be dangerous or useless."
Summary? You're practically forcing me to read TFA
It would be a lot more efficient if you just had a cron job that sent out an email every night.
The point of the story is that companies publish the successful trials on a drug, but don't publish failed trials on that same drug - i.e. they cherry-pick the results.
This very subject was addressed, very eloquently as usual, by Richard Feynman in his famous Cargo Cult Science lecture.
It's called the "file drawer problem" and impacts every field of science. If you don't find significant results, you don't get published, and you stick your "failed" study in the file drawer. As a result, "failed" studies on ANY topic usually get swept away. It's unfortunate, but there's nothing particular sinister about it (as the article seems to imply). There's just no incentive to publish the trials and studies that didn't work.
I have fresh horse urine for only $9 per ounce. Do you want to be cured, or not?
Nay.
It's not just cherry picking - which wouldn't matter so much in itself. Drugs are very hit and miss you expect lots of things to just not work.
The problem is they study drugs X, Y, and Z in combination and find that not only does it not help it makes the patients worse. They don't bother publishing since they didn't get anything useful out of it and no one is going to cite them...
A year later another group decides to study X, Y, and Z in combination. So a pointless study that harms patients is done because this second group never found out about the previous study in their literature search.
First of all, the mod who gave you "redundant" apparently doesn't realize that this has been widely known for a long time.
Second, this is new because someone's done the actual study and shown the degree to which studies don't go reported. Even if only half of the unreported studies were because of poor results, that's enough to skew things very, very badly.
Anyone doing this should get put in jail for a long, long time. It may not be fraud in the sense that they're publishing fraudulent results, but by not publishing results they're creating fraudulent overall data, with possibly deadly results. This needs to stop.
Whoever modded that down as overrated clearly didn't know enough to judge. You don't publish negative results because of the time and effort it takes to write it up.
The reasons vary for different fields. A lot of times, researchers don't bother doing proper controls until after the experiment works or doesn't. If the trial run works, you do the controls afterward to verify your result was real, if you don't get the result you expect you might try it again, doing some troubleshooting, but at some point you have to make a choice between a control that would be particularly onerous or expensive, or giving up on the experiment entirely. If you get a negative result that you're not interested in, you generally don't do the controls to prove to others it was a valid result because you don't care and have better things to do. But that's what you would have to do to publish it.
A negative but true result can also be even more difficult to prove than a positive result would be. If you are expecting one protein to interact with another one, and you get no result, it could be that they are and your test just isn't working. If you do the experiment a different way and still show no interaction that makes it a little more convincing, but doesn't prove that both systems are working. You can't say for sure they don't interact in real cells.
In clinical trials you could think of additional reasons why someone would not care to publish the negative results. The most obvious is that the drug company doesn't want to make it known that they're working on drug X. Not sure how that works, but you could imagine that they might have to patent it to keep others from using it, and then the clock on the patent starts before they actually get it working. They could spend 5 years refining it before it actually works, then more years before it gets to market, and they only have a few years before the patent runs out. If they don't patent it and aren't sure it's a complete dead-end, another company might take the results and make a working drug from it, effectively stealing the expensive work to get up to that point.
Not a lawyer or an expert on the pharmecutical industry obviously, but publishing means making it known, and they're only going to do that if they're sure they're done with it, if then.
It makes sense that they're not going to be published, and while it's less than ideal, I think it would be worse to force the pharmecuticals to publish negative results of trials. If you make the clinical trial phase that risky, companies would be more reluctant to develop new drugs that haven't already proven effective, and advances in cancer treatment would slow.
The most obvious is that the drug company doesn't want to make it known that they're working on drug X. Not sure how that works, but you could imagine that they might have to patent it to keep others from using it, and then the clock on the patent starts before they actually get it working.
Except clinical trials are not required to attain patent protection. Any drug company with good patent practitioners is going to have a patent application filed *before* clinical trials. You can always abandon it later if the clinical trials don't work out. It's much cheaper to file and then abandon an application on a drug than to miss the opportunity to get a patent on a successful drug.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
I have been told by someone who would know (psychiatrist) that drug trials (maybe just here in Australia) have to be announced before the trial begins otherwise the outcomes can't be published. The idea is that you have to announce a trial before you begin, and so if the outcomes are bad and you don't publish, the bad outcome can be inferred from the lack of publication, even if the specifics remain unknown.