Intended for healthcare professionals

Feature Open Data Campaign

Tamiflu: the battle for secret drug data

BMJ 2012; 345 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.e7303 (Published 29 October 2012) Cite this as: BMJ 2012;345:e7303
  1. David Payne, editor, bmj.com
  1. 1BMJ, London WC1H 9JR
  1. dpayne{at}bmj.com

Influenza drug oseltamivir has made billions of pounds for Roche, but why won’t the company give patients and doctors access to the full clinical data? As part of the BMJ’s open data campaign, we this week launch a new site dedicated to the cause. David Payne reports

This week the BMJ, as part of its ongoing open data campaign, has launched a dedicated website aimed at persuading Roche to give doctors and patients access to the full data on oseltamivir (Tamiflu).

The new site, www.bmj.com/tamiflu, displays emails and letters dating back to September 2009, when researcher Tom Jefferson first asked the company for the unpublished dataset used in a Roche supported analysis, published in 2003.1

Jefferson needed the data by the following month to update the Cochrane Collaboration’s review on neuraminidase inhibitors in healthy adults. At first the company asked him to sign a confidentiality agreement promising that he would not publish the data in full.2

Then it declined to supply it on the grounds that it had been approached by an independent expert influenza group undertaking a similar meta-analysis and wanted to avoid a conflict. Roche added that its study reports had also been shared with the regulatory authorities.

Jefferson told the company in an email: “I recognise that more people than me are interested in reviewing the trials of interventions for influenza at the moment.

“But I don’t understand why this should lead to exclusivity, or why you would believe that there would be a conflict between our plans to update our Cochrane review and the plans of the other research groups you mention.”

Jefferson’s October deadline passed. Two months later the Cochrane review, published in the BMJ,3 said that because eight of the 10 randomised controlled trials on which effectiveness …

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