Non-Commercial versus Commercial Clinical Trials: a Retrospective Study of the Applications Submitted to a Research Ethics Committee

Summary

There are a lot of difficulties in undertaking independent clinical research without support from the pharmaceutical industry. In this retrospective observational study some design characteristics, the clinical trial public register and the publication rate of non-commercial clinical trials were compared to those of commercial clinical trials.

A total of 809 applications of drug-evaluation clinical trials were submitted from May 2004 to May 2009 to the research ethics committee of a tertiary hospital, and 16.3% of trials were non-commercial. They were mainly phase IV, multicenter national, and unmasked controlled trials, compared to the commercial trials that were mainly phase II- III, multicenter international, and double-blind masked trials. The commercial trials were registered and published more often than non-commercial ones. More funding for non-commercial research is still needed. The results of the research, commercial or non-commercial, have to be disseminated in order not to compromise either its scientific or its social value.

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