GlaxoSmithKline's Marketing Firm Promised "Clinical Trials Could be Your Solution" to Poor Graduate Students

We have frequently raised concerns about the increasing domination of clinical research, particularly clinical trials, by those with vested in interests in the research producing particular results.  In particular, drug, biotechnology and device companies often sponsor trials meant to evaluate their own products.  Often it appears that commercial trial sponsors manipulate various aspects of research design, implementation, analysis, and dissemination to increase the likelihood of a result favorable to their interests.  Furthermore, when even such manipulation fails to produce the desired result, particular studies may simply be suppressed, that is, hidden.

Clinical Trial Participation as "Your Solution" to Graduate Students' Money Woes

A recent story, first told on the In-Pharma Technologist web site, gave an example of how trial recruitment could be gamed so as to produce more compliant study subjects. Since that web-site does not allow copy and pasting of even a few sentences of its content, I will quote, instead, from a subsequent article in the Guardian.

GlaxoSmithKline  the pharmaceuticals multinational, has apologised after being accused of playing on the hardship of unpaid interns to recruit them to take part in clinical trials.

A marketing firm working for the FTSE 100 company sought to place a blog on careers advice websites boasting that involvement in drug trials could help graduates to finance their way through unpaid work placements.

In a proposed 'guest blog' for the website Graduate Fog, an employee at TouchPoint Digital, working on behalf of GSK, wrote: 'Clinical trials could be your solution.'

The "guest blog" proposed that many graduate students "would prefer an immediate income to tide you over for the coming months."  So,

Clinical trials could be your solution. Depending on the length of the study, you could earn up to £2,000 per trial for up to 4 trials a year, plus reasonable travel expenses.

This was not a one-off,

 Touchpoint provided examples of similar articles previously published on websites targeted at students. In an email to the founder of Graduate Fog, Tanya de Grunwald, it added: 'Your readers would also benefit if there is a small link at the end of the article to the GSK website, which is the biggest pharmaceutical company in the UK, so that if they want to find out more or get answers to more specific questions they can do so.'

Excessive Inducement

The story was picked up by Ed Silverman at the PharmaLot blog in the US, who pointed out how TouchPoint Digital appeared to be supplying an excessive inducement to vulnerable subjects,

Tanya de Grunwald, who runs the Graduate Fog website in the U.K., objected to the tone of the overture. 'Some of my readers are feeling very low, vulnerable and desperate for money,' she wrote us in an e-mail after openly questioning the recruiting tactic in a note to readers on her website last week. 'Many are unemployed. Others are in low-paid graduate jobs or doing unpaid internships.'

'Suggesting that participating clinical trials is a great way to earn easy cash is not just crass – I think it’s irresponsible. Surely, the more desperate someone is for money, the more likely they are to be dazzled by the financial benefits and less careful about weighing up the risks.'

A long time ago, that is, from 2006 - 2008, we published a series of posts about how contract research organizations running clinical research projects for commercial health care firms often preyed on financially and otherwise vulnerable research subjects by offering what would appear to such people to be dazzling remuneration.  For example, we discussed the trials by SFBC International (later PharmaNet Development Group, and now apparently Inventiv Health Clinical)  in Miami that enrolled immigrants, often undocumented, under questionable circumstances and in Montreal that resulted in the transmission of active tuberculosis (see post here and links backward); and the trial by Parexel International in London that put most of its subjects in intensive care (see post here, with links backward). In 2008, as we discussed here, two articles questioning the ethics of research done under the auspices of CRO appeared in two major medical journals.  Excessively zealous recruiting designed to tempt vulnerable subjects with money appears unethical, and may be dangerous for these subjects.

How Excessive Inducement Could Lead to Invalid Trial Results

Not only is such a practice apparently unethical and dangerous, it could endanger patients outside the research projects in question by producing invalid research.  Subjects who could be dazzled by such inducements might avoid disclosing conditions which would otherwise exclude them from particular research projects, or participate in multiple projects without sufficient or any wash out periods in between, meaning that one treatment's effects could confound another.  (Note that the blog post proposed by the marketer above suggested that subjects could participate in multiple trials during one year.)  Furthermore, subjects desperate to complete studies and earn their fees might avoid reporting adverse effects to avoid the risk of premature termination of their participation, or avoid protesting questionable actions by the researchers.   

But now in the modern era of the Internet and social media, overzealous recruitment using monetary lures is still going on.  As per PharmaLot,

One expert believes the flap is not surprising, because drug makers are under pressure to maintain a steady stream of clinical trial recruits.

'Middle class folks just sit back and wait until the drug reaches the market. Poor folks are the guinea pigs in an economy that is more and more uneven, and uncertain by the day,' says Roberto Abadie, a senior researcher at the Social Networks Research Group at John Jay College, City University of New York, and author of ‘The Professional Guinea Pig: Big Pharma and the Risky World of Human Subjects.'

A Belated Response from GSK

Apparently only after the story broke did GSK notice there was a problem.  Again, per PharmaLot,

A Glaxo spokeswoman blamed the outside marketing firm for the episode. In an e-mail, she wrote us that 'we would agree that the tone used in the ads… is wrong. It trivializes the role of clinical trials in developing new medicines and the part that volunteers play in that process. This isn’t acceptable and we’re looking into what happened.'

Whether GSK was properly supervising the marketing firm, and whether GSK had provided incentives that might have lead to overzealous recruitment were not addressed.

Summary

This story is yet another reminder that health care professionals, health policy makers, and the public at large should be extremely skeptical of clinical research sponsored (and controlled) by those with vested interests in the research results turning out a certain way, particularly clinical trials run by drug, biotechnology, or biotechnology companies meant to assess those companies' own products. However, note that very rarely do published clinical trial reports provide enough detail about subject recruitment to determine whether overzealous recruitment and undue inducements may have lead to enrollment of subjects who should have been excluded, under reporting of adverse effects, etc.

In my humble opinion, we need to reassess current policies that allows organizations with such obvious conflicts of interest to run experiments on human beings (which is what clinical trials are.)

By the way, this story is also a reminder that most big drug, device and biotechnology firms seem to be associated again and again with dodgy clinical research.   For example, see what we have previously written about GSK here.