Nihar Desai says there are no real consequences for failing to report data.
The majority of results from clinical trials at leading academic medical centers are not quickly published or shared with researchers and the public.
Call it a research "blind spot" -- studies that get funded and conducted, but whose results may not see the light of day.
"We desperately need the research enterprise to be robust and for it to be transparent," said NiharDesai, from the Yale School of Medicine, speaking on WNPR's The Colin McEnroe Show.
Desai and his colleagues recently looked at more than 4,300 clinical trials, examining how many results were published or posted online. "The results that we found were staggering," said Desai. "We found less than 40 percent were disseminated within two years of study completion."
Why? Desai wrote in the journal The BMJ that it's partially because there are no real consequences for failing to report data.
To fix that, he'd like more research funding to require a later reporting of results. Desai said his study demonstrates a current failure of academic medicine, both to its mission of research -- and to its patients.
"We should be able to ensure that experiments that are done, particularly with human subjects -- that the data from those experiments are not sequestered and hidden, but rather that they are shared and disseminated through the various channels that we have," Desai said.
He's talking about channels like peer-reviewed journals or more open-access environments, like the online-platform ClinicalTrials.gov.
"Our aim in doing this work was not just to highlight a problem, but to have this as a call to action," Desai said. "There are blind spots in the clinical research enterprise. And academic medical centers, public funders, pharmaceutical companies -- all have to be held to account when they're the ones that are primarily conducting these clinical trials."
