America’s medicines regulator has chased up thousands of missing clinical trial results with universities and pharma and medical device companies. This is big news. For most of these institutions, it will be the first time they have ever heard from the FDA about their legal obligations. In a press release, the FDA announced that: “Far too often, companies are suppressing unfavorable clinical trial results and keeping them secret from patients and the scientific community.” “On March 30,...

The European Medicines Agency has just released its quarterly data update on drug trials conducted within Europe. The charts below provide an overview of new initial clinical trial applications from January 2022 until the end of 2025. While not all of those studies will have been approved, the data provide a nice heuristic overview of drug trial volume and composition by country. Number of drug trials per country Patients in Spain, France, Germany, Italy and – maybe surprisingly – Poland...

Fourteen funding bodies from around the world have committed to improving clinical trial registration and reporting. The signatories include two major East Asian funders that appear to be publicly committing themselves to trial transparency for the first time: Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development National Institute of Health, Republic of Korea The trial transparency commitments are included in the wider-ranging WHO-initiated “ Joint statement on strengthening clinical trials...