Data on clinical trials in people have not reached the public registry within the required deadline, “violating ethical obligations” to the trial participants.

The pharmaceutical industry is responsible for most of the clinical trials for which summary information must be made publicly available, since US laws created the public registry, but it is failing to meet all its transparency obligations, say researchers – yet there are worse offenders.

The drug industry is the main target for public disclosure at ClinicalTrials.gov. The website was set up amid concerns that pharma sponsors and investigators running the trials “were selectively publishing trials that favored sponsors’ interests,” according to the lead author of a new study reviewing the registry.

And pharma has failed, in the first 5 years of the registry examined by the research, to get data onto it within the required 12 months – just 17% of industry-sponsored trials covered by the law made it to […]