Researchers who conduct industry-sponsored studies should not have personal financial ties to the companies whose products they are studying, a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine said at a conference on research ethics this weekend.

What's more, said Marcia Angell, the former editor, universities where such research is conducted "should have no investment whatsoever in any health-care industry, period."

Many universities and ethicists have been discussing ways to minimize conflicts of interest in biomedical research, but those talks have largely focused on when financial ties should be disclosed and on limits to those ties. Dr. Angell's proposal would go far beyond what most universities require of their researchers or for their own endowments.

Dr. Angell, who stepped down as the journal's editor in chief on June 30, said that when researchers and institutions have financial connections to industry, it can result in a "cozy relationship" that interferes with the kind of independent inquiry that the public expects from academic medicine.

"The search for truth is giving way to the search for profits," said Dr. Angell, who became executive editor of the journal in 1988 and editor in chief in 1999. She is now a lecturer in the department of social medicine at Harvard Medical School.

One way to restore confidence in the scientific enterprise, Dr. Angell said, is for institutions to insist that when scientists conduct research on a company's product or idea, they have no other financial connection -- no consultancies, no equity interest, and no role as a paid speaker for the company.

"The role of investigators is not to evaluate their own work and certainly not to promote it," she said.

Universities, Dr. Angell said, should follow the same code of ethics that she did as a medical-journal editor: Avoid all health-care investments. "They can invest in real estate," and anything else, she said of the universities. "If I can do it, they can do it"

During a talk before about 60 academics and others involved in the conduct and oversight of medical research, Dr. Angell also decried the overall influence of industry-financed research. Academic medical centers "are no longer able to function as watchdogs" because they are so dependent on the companies for grants, she said.

Dr. Angell also discussed a drug manufacturer's recent demand that the University of California at San Francisco pay up to $10-million over the publication of a study that concluded that a drug made by the company was ineffective against H.I.V. Such cases are becoming all too common, she said.

In some instances, she said, corporate sponsors pressure researchers to convert a negative study into a positive one, by having them exclude or deemphasize certain findings. Or they try to have the study quashed altogether. "There is no way to know how many negative studies have been suppressed," she said, "or worse, how many negative studies were converted into positives."

Researchers who believe that positive studies are more likely to be published than negative ones also sometimes employ the same tactics in studies financed by the National Institutes of Health or other nonprofit organizations, she acknowledged. But the practice, she said, is "far more common in industry-sponsored research than in N.I.H.-sponsored research."
 
 

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