The Guardian, Sarah Boseley, health editor, Thursday 11 October 2012
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| GlaxoSmithKline says it has a ‘real commitment to transparency’. Photograph: Michael Walter /Troika |
The British drugs company GlaxoSmithKline is to open up the detailed data from its clinical trials to the scrutiny of scientists in a bid to help the discovery of new medicines and end the suspicions of critics that it has secrets to hide.
In a speech
today to the Wellcome Trust in London, the chief executive, Andrew Witty, will
say openness to the public and active collaboration with scientists and firms
outside GSK are essential to finding new drugs to treat the diseases plaguing
the world, from novel antibiotics to cures for malaria and tuberculosis.
He told the
Guardian GSK had already done much to advance transparency in clinical
research, including publishing a summary of every drug trial – whether a
success or not – on its website.
"We've
done an awful lot around this area but I think it's still fair to say that not
everybody believes that everything is made public. Even things we do all the
time we're criticised for not doing," he said. "People say we only
publish positive trials. No, we publish everything. But the fact that people
don't know or haven't yet accepted that we have this real commitment to
transparency – we've got to keep working harder to get that message
across."
GSK will
set up an independent board which will assess requests from scientists to look
at the anonymised patient data from the trials and grant access on merit
through a secure website.
Witty
accepted there could be attempts at fishing trips by anti-vaccination groups or
critics of GSK drugs such as the antidepressant Seroxat, which was linked a
decade ago to increased suicidal feelings in the young, amid accusations that
the company had known and hidden the data years earlier.
Witty, who
took over as CEO when the scandal had largely died down, said he was prepared
to take the risk: "We know it's possible people will mix and match different
data, come up with what we would regard as non-scientifically credible
conclusions but, in a way, it's not our job to decide that. It's the job of
society, the regulators, to make a decision about what's credible and what
isn't credible as a scientific conclusion."
He said
nothing would make him happier than to see outside scientists use the data to
find new drugs. "While of course there is a risk of mischief, I think
there is a much higher possibility of transforming the usefulness of this data
on a much more positive set of agendas.
"There
isn't a day goes by that me and the rest of the company aren't grateful for
what patients offer to do in a clinical trial. They offer willingly to go
through a process of experimentation. That's an extraordinary gift from
individual men and women. At one very human level actually we should be finding
ways to make that commitment as useful as it can possibly be for society."
Witty will
also announce new initiatives in the hunt for cures for neglected tropical
diseases, building on a strategy begun soon after he took over as CEO. GSK has
now screened its entire pharmaceutical library of more than 2m compounds to
find any that could inhibit tuberculosis, he will say. It has found 200
promising "hits" that the company will make available to researchers
wanting to investigate further. GSK did the same for anti-malarial compounds in
2009, which has led to a number of research projects into potential new drugs.
An extra
£5m funding to the Open Lab, which the company established at its Tres Cantos
facility in Spain in 2010, will also be announced. Independent researchers with
projects relating to developing world diseases are invited to use its
facilities and collaborate with GSK scientists. There are 16 such projects
under way.
Witty said
he had tried to tackle the issues that people outside the drug industry cared
about, such as transparency, access to medicines and prices, not through
corporate social responsibility "but by fundamentally challenging the
business model that we operated". That included allowing researchers to
work on compounds over which GSK had patents in the hunt for cures for
neglected tropical diseases. "Whatever tiny risk we took in that decision
has more than paid off in terms of what it has led to, I think for people in
Africa and people who suffer from these diseases."
Sir Mark
Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, is a keen advocate of transparency,
calling particularly on scientists with public funding to make the results of
their research freely and widely available. He was supportive of Witty's
initiatives.
"In
its commitment towards more openness and collaboration, GSK is setting an
example of how the pharmaceutical industry must adapt to help drive forward
medical advances. Real breakthroughs do not come out of nowhere, but are borne
of scientists sharing their knowledge and learning from each other. GSK's moves
are bold and innovative, a very positive sign of its commitment to tackle some
of the greatest health challenges facing the world today," he said.
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