Schools urged to police financial ties

Better vigilance is needed to ensure medical research on human subjects is not flawed by financial conflicts of interest, according to the Assn. of American Medical Colleges and the Assn. of American Universities.

In March, the two organizations issued a report that calls on medical schools and research universities to put into place conflict-of-interest policies within two years. Such policies should cover how to identify, evaluate and manage financial conflicts, the report said.

The move comes amid growing concern about research bias.

In 2005, a National Institutes of Health director broke government spending rules and was found to have disregarded conflict-of-interest guidelines in his previous job as a university faculty member. The scandal prompted the AAMC and AAU to create a joint committee that developed the report issued last month.

"We hope this will have a substantial impact," said committee co-chair Robert R. Rich, MD. "There's a sense of urgency within the medical profession, because the public's trust is vital to everything we do."

Dr. Rich, senior vice president for medicine and dean of the University of Alabama School of Medicine at Birmingham, said the report refined previous recommendations made by the organizations, particularly in the area of institutional conflicts of interest.

Many schools have policies governing such conflicts for individual researchers and school officials. But they have been slow to create standards to manage institutions' financial ties and research, Dr. Rich said.

Institutional conflicts include schools receiving royalties from sales of a research product and owning stock or stock options in the research sponsor, the report said.

As of 2006, 30 of the 125 surveyed medical schools had a policy, according to research in the Feb. 13 JAMA.