A failed attempt at collaboration

The Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research, a non-profit independent foundation, has withheld its involvement in an Innovative Medicines Initiative project that included clinical research and development of a product owned by GlaxoSmithKline.

Although we fully support the idea of further collaboration with industry, on this occasion the cooperation was not quite what we had hoped for. GSK set down the protocol for the clinical research in the partnership, and when we questioned some of the company’s methodological choices—such as the comparator drug and sample size—it became clear that these were not open for discussion. A project agreement written by GSK and attached to the study protocol set out dozens of pages of rules and conditions that would effectively have made this a …