Ben Goldacre (previously) led a team that created the FDAAA Trials Tracker, “A live informatics tool to monitor compliance with FDA requirements to report clinical trial results.”
Goldacre has spent years campaigning to force companies to report in all
their clinical trials; many of the drugs on the market today were
approved even though more than half of their trials never reported in,
meaning that pharma companies were able to cherry-pick the trials that
yielded favorable results and simply not publish trials that showed that
their products were useless or even harmful.
The US government currently requires all trials to be registered on
ClinicalTrials.gov when they start – trials that aren’t reported in at
their commencement are not eligible for consideration during FDA
evaluation; and since ClinicalTrials.gov is public, it should be
possible for the public and watchdogs to discover whether pharma
companies are reporting in on all their trials.
That’s where FDAAA Trials Tracker comes in: it downloads an XML dump
from ClinicalTrials.gov, analyzes it, and tracks which trials are due or
overdue, as well as “whether they have reported results in accor-
dance with the law; give performance statistics
for each individual trial sponsor; and calculate
potential fines that could have been levied by
the FDA against sponsors.”
