Elsevier

Mayo Clinic Proceedings

Volume 91, Issue 11, November 2016, Pages 1668-1670
Mayo Clinic Proceedings

Letter to the Editor
Industry Funding of Cancer Patient Advocacy Organizations

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2016.08.015Get rights and content

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Methods

On December 19, 2015, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network's (NCCN's) patient advocacy webpage (http://www.nccn.org/patients/advocacy/default.aspx) was visited. We selected the NCCN-recommended PAOs because the NCCN is an influential cancer organization, and the website is advertised as a starting place for patients with cancer to find a supporting organization. We extracted all PAOs for a specific tumor type. Organizations listed in multiple tumor types were recorded once.

One of the

Results

We identified 68 unique PAOs for specific cancer subtypes recommended by the NCCN (Table). Fifty-one of the 68 PAOs (75.0%) disclosed a median of 7 biopharmaceutical sponsors. Sixteen PAOs (23.5%) did not report whether they had biopharmaceutical sponsorship. One PAO (1.5%) specifically reported that it does not accept money from the biopharmaceutical industry.

The number of disclosed biopharmaceutical sponsors ranged from 1 to 19 for the 51 organizations that accepted biopharmaceutical money.

Conclusion

The present study found that most cancer PAOs listed by the NCCN receive funding from the biopharmaceutical industry. Other researchers have been critical of such arrangements because they may jeopardize the independence of these groups.4

This study is limited in that although the search is a systematic sample of PAOs, it is not a comprehensive analysis of all cancer PAOs. We encourage other investigators to study this issue in other data sets. Moreover, this study may underestimate sponsorship

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