U.S. study sees bias in company-funded statin trials

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Clinical trials comparing cholesterol-lowering drugs to one another are far more likely to yield results favoring the one whose maker paid for the research, scientists said on Monday in the latest work showing bias in company-sponsored studies.

Researchers led by Lisa Bero of the University of California-San Francisco analyzed the results of 192 trials assessing how well various cholesterol-lowering statin drugs work compared to other ones or non-statin drugs.

Studies that produced favorable results toward a given statin were more than 20 times as likely to have been funded by that drug's manufacturer rather than the company that made the drug to which it was being compared, Bero's team found.

In addition, trials in which the investigators included favorable subjective conclusions or interpretations of statistical results were nearly 35 times more likely to have been funded by the drug's manufacturer, Bero's team added.

The researchers cited design flaws in many company-funded trials like not ensuring that investigators conducting them were unaware of which patients were getting which drugs until the end of the trial.

"It's not like they're all poorly designed," Bero said in a telephone interview. "But, on the other hand, a lot of them are designed in ways that can make the sponsor's drug look better."

Bero said the findings raise suspicions that some drug companies may be manipulating the design and interpretation of trials to get results that can boost sales of a product.

"We can't answer why we're seeing that bias. But it definitely makes me more skeptical," Bero added.