Aubrey Blumsohn

Drug company's pretence

The Case of Dr Aubrey Blumsohn

Geoffrey Porter-Williams

In the early 1990s the late Dr Chris Chapman was dismissed from a scientific post after bringing to light scientific fraud arising out of commercial contracts in a laboratory at Leeds General Infirmary jointly managed with Leeds University (He was supported by FtC. see http://www.freedomtocare.org/page51.htm). There have been several other cases of the corrupting influence of commercial sponsorship on scientific publications from universities.

Dr Aubrey Blumsohn's case featured in the press from November 2005. He was employed at Sheffield University as a senior lecturer and honorary consultant in metabolic bone disease. He was engaged on a joint research project with Procter & Gamble Pharmaceutical, which funded the work and had a commercial interest in the outcome. He was asked to publish in his own name academic papers prepared by a writer working on behalf of Procter & Gamble Pharmaceutical about the effects on patients of the anti-osteoporosis drug Actonel. When Dr Blumsohn asked to see the raw data underlying the draft papers, initially the request was refused. Eventually he had limited access to the data he had requested and found that some of the data underlying the findings he was asked to endorse was omitted from the statistical analysis.

When Dr Blumsohn raised a concern about his name being put to such a paper he was reminded of the substantial income that Sheffield University received from Procter & Gamble Pharmaceutical. Later he was suspended and offered a severance payment in return for signing a gagging clause.

After Dr Blumsohn's case became public knowledge, Procter & Gamble Pharmaceutical announced in February 2006 that researchers would have a right of access to all the data relevant to their work, enabling them to check statements that were to be made in their names.

In April 2006 the UK Panel for Research Integrity in Health and Biomedical Sciences was launched, initially with three years' funding, to encourage self regulation of research institutions and to support whistleblowers in the field of academic research. Should more radical changes be made? When research is on behalf of a large multi-national company to prove the efficacy of its own products, it would be more appropriate for the work to be done entirely in its own laboratories and published in its own name. But there are smaller companies for which university labs are a valuable resource.

Some research into products would be better publicly funded. For example the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has a duty to recommend the conditions in which particular drugs should or should not be used in the National Health Service. So any research into assessing the effectiveness of particular drugs that are already in use should be sponsored by NICE, not by the manufacturer. Often such research should compare the effects of all the drugs used in the field to identify the conditions in which one or another drug should be preferred.

When a university's role in research is limited, such as when the university does the laboratory analysis and the statistical analysis is done elsewhere, the university's limited role in the research should be made explicit in any publication of the result. Academics should only publish in their own name reports on work that they have done themselves or actively supervised.