Government advisory committees
Two recent stories on COI in the context of US government health research advisory committees caught my attention.
1) FDA to Broaden Disclosure on Advisers’ Conflicts of Interest
- In a move to redress some of the major concerns about COI on the part of researchers who serve on Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committees (e.g., researchers with pharma or medical device industry ties), while accepting that some COI may be inevitable (e.g., because there are only a few expert researchers and they all have financial interests) the FDA is proposing new guidelines dealing with the public declaration of financial interests.
2) Senator pushes CDC to disclose experts’ conflicts
- in a similar vein, attention is being brought to bear on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and their handling of COI on the part of expert researchers giving advice to the CDC committees.
In both of these cases, the issue is about ensuring that the topmost government health agencies — which seek advice from the academic research community in setting policy or making funding decisions — do so in a manner that recognise the interests of the parties involved, and put in place mechanisms to manage any conflicts.
P.S.: Dec 20, 2010: See this commentary by Chris MacDonald Conflict of Interest in the PMO: Just What is the Worry?, which gives a nice description of the major perception problem of COI when industry members work with government.
