November 29, 2015
The Washington Post had an article on a new report from the Government Accountability Office which noted that most clinical trials don’t report differences in outcome by gender. This could be another advantage of publicly funded clinical trials. The government could make a condition of financing that all the baseline characteristics of the participants in trials (e.g. gender, age, weight, etc.) be publicly disclosed along with the outcomes. This would allow other researchers and doctors to better determine which drugs might be best for their patients.
Of course, the other major advantage of having the government pay for the trials (after buying up all rights to the drugs) is that successful drugs would be immediately available at generic prices. It would not be necessary for hand wringing over paying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for drugs like Sovaldi or the new generation of cancer drugs coming on the market. It also wouldn’t then be necessary for the Obama administration to send its trade negotiators overseas to beat up our trading partners demanding stronger and longer patent and related protections for prescription drugs.
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