Scholars and doctors met on Pitt’s campus yesterday to discuss the pressing issue of… Scholars and doctors met on Pitt’s campus yesterday to discuss the pressing issue of preventing biases in the sciences from private interests and companies.

Held in the Assembly Room of the William Pitt Union, the plenary session titled “Protecting Science from Bias by Private Interests” featured several key speakers. Sheldon Krimsky, a professor of urban and environmental policy at Tufts University, and Catherine D. DeAngelis, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association and a member of Pitt’s Board of Trustees, were only two of the distinguished speakers.

“Economic partnerships with the pharmaceutical industry don’t have to be evil,” Arthur S. Levine, dean of the School of Medicine, said during the event.

Partnerships with the pharmaceutical industry have helped to “accelerate research and promote medical advances,” Levine said, but each speaker agreed that the bias in scientific research created by financial relations with pharmaceutical companies should be controlled.

About one out of four biomedical researchers have affiliations with the pharmaceutical industry, according to a 2003 study that was published in JAMA. Although “conflicts of interest are ubiquitous,” DeAngelis said, pressure from influential companies is detrimental. Researchers are four times more likely to review a drug favorably if they have industry relations, according to the study.

To demonstrate the harm that this kind of influence causes to consumers, DeAngelis referenced a study completed for an HIV immunogen that was supposedly capable of eradicating the disease. Before JAMA printed the company-funded study in support of the immunogen, an independent researcher decried the study’s findings, demonstrating that the immunogen did not work in 80 to 85 percent of the data.

“The company that had funded the research held a press conference and announced their impending approval by the FDA,” DeAngelis said. “So we published the article online before it could be approved. And that’s OK, that instead of getting properly medicated, all of those people would have depended on a treatment that didn’t work?” she asked angrily.

While biased research is an unacceptable consequence of research-corporate relationships, Levine urged conflict management strategies to eliminate bias instead of setting “the clock back unrealistically,” because “no one else is going to pay for drug research,” Krimsky said. DeAngelis and Krimsky called for transparency in disclosing any financial relationships in research studies and accountability for research.

“Unless you want to be taking your grandmother’s medicines, we need partnerships with the industry,” DeAngelis said. “But we need them done the right way, with everyone understanding what is right and ethical and what isn’t.”