Desperate, Vulnerable Research Subjects, Cost-Cutting Contract Research Organizations and Threats to the Integrity of Clinical Research

Introduction - Clinical Research Done by Contract Research Organizations

Dr Carl Elliott seems to be one of the few people willing to investigate how modern medical research may threaten vulnerable research subjects.  His book, White Coat, Black Hat, opened with a chapter on vulnerable "guinea pigs," people willing to be clinical research subjects for money.  Such people may be desperate for money, and further may be homeless, and have psychiatric problems, including psychosis or drug or alcohol problems.  Dr Elliott just wrote another important article on the plight of vulnerable research subjects. As Dr Elliott wrote,

Most people think of pharmaceutical research as a highly technical activity that takes place in world-class medical centers. The reality is somewhat different.

This is apparent in a grainy video that I watched a few years ago. It had apparently been recorded on a cell phone, and the camerawork started off wobbly. A tanned man wearing sunglasses and a necklace appeared and was introduced as Dr. Johnny Edrozo, a psychiatric researcher. His shirt was unbuttoned partway down his chest. 'The latest stimulant coming out of the market is Vyvanse, which is a Dexedrine preparation,' Edrozo told the interviewer, pausing occasionally to chew gum. For reasons that were not explained, the interview took place in a parked car.

This was my introduction to South Coast Clinical Trials, a chain of private research sites in Southern California that specializes in testing psychiatric drugs. Pharmaceutical companies now typically outsource clinical studies to contract research organizations like South Coast, which run trials faster and at lower cost than universities do. Their job is simply to follow the instructions of their sponsors.

This formula is working: The contract research industry has grown steadily since the early 1990s and may now generate over $100 billion in annual income, according to the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. At the top of the heap are corporations like Quintiles, which has 28,000 employees and operates in about 100 countries. At the other end are private physicians and small companies like South Coast, which are often based in strip malls or suburban office parks.

We first wrote about contract research organizations in 2005 based on a Bloomberg report that noted research conducted in a crumbling physical plant, on poor, often drug-addicted patients who "barely read" informed consent documents, bad record keeping, supervision by poorly trained or unlicensed clinicians.  It appears the problems have only gotten worse.

Vulnerable, Desperate Research Subjects


Dr Elliott made it clear that many of the research subjects enrolled by companies like South Coast are vulnerable. He noted that the companies purposefully recruit subjects from rooming houses and homeless shelters. Here is a description of the sorts of pitches they use.

'I was tired, I was hungry, and half an hour earlier the police had treated us like crap,' Burns said. 'And this woman is saying, ‘Imagine, in 40 days you’ll have $4,000!’ The recruiter made testing drugs sound like a vacation in a five-star hotel, Burns said. 'It’s like a resort selling time shares. They talk about all the benefits first, and it sounds great, but then you start to ask: What do I have to do?' 

Dr Elliott emphasized that such research studies can endanger subjects, but that poor, homeless, drug or alcohol addicted, or psychotic people offered thousands of dollars for participation are not likely to worry about the danger. He also suggested that monitoring and protection of such subjects may not be the most intense.

Obviously, this may be very bad for such research subjects. This is why it has long been considered unethical to recruit such vulnerable subjects in such dubious circumstances. But in this day and age of "greed is good," it may be all to easy to dismiss the risks as contingent on life styles that were already full of "bad choices."

Threats to the Validity of Clinical Research

Recruiting vulnerable patients, especially the poor, homeless, drug or alcohol addicted, or psychotic, into clinical research has dangers for patients not in those trials, and for health care professionals.

Remember that the principles of evidence-based medicine suggest that health care professionals should base decisions for patients on the best clinical research evidence. The quality of these decisions determine the quality of patient care and strongly affect patient outcomes. .

Yet if an increasing proportion of clinical research is being done on vulnerable, that is poor, homeless, drug or alcohol addicted or psychotic people, the validity of that research may be badly compromised.

Consider this narrative from Dr Elliott's article,

I walked round the corner to a shelter, where I talked to an elderly white man. 'I’d say the majority of guys here take advantage of that,' he told me, 'because they get a lot of money and they’re broke as hell.'

So, for example, to qualify for a study of drug addiction treatment,

I mentioned a recruitment flyer I’d seen outside the shelter asking for subjects with 'cocaine dependency.' George nodded. He told me that a lot of people start taking drugs just so they can qualify for those studies.

'You take that s*** two days before to get it into your blood.' He mentioned that he had recently screened for a trial at a research site running addiction studies. 'There were people in the waiting room high as a kite,' he said. 'They were incoherent.'

Also,

The main ethical issues here, of course, are the competence and judgment of the prospective subjects. 'When you say ‘money,’ everything else goes out the window,' said Hanif Jackson, a former program supervisor at the Ridge Avenue shelter in Philadelphia, which recently closed down. I heard the same thing from Harvey Bass, a chaplain who has worked at the Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission shelter for 15 years. He said drug study recruiters often park outside the shelter and approach residents on the sidewalk. Although Bass didn’t think it was his place to warn residents away from the studies, it was clear that he was not exactly a fan. 'These guys have no job, no home, and a habit, he said. 'You have people at their lowest state, and they’ll say yes to anything.' 

As someone who has reviewed innumerable reports of clinical trials and other clinical research studies for journal clubs, journals, and grant review committees, I know that on paper clinical research studies have elaborate and specific criteria to include and exclude patients, and require patients to undergo detailed study protocols. However, can one really expect patients who are so desperate for money that "they'll say yes to anything" to admit to conditions which would exclude them from a trial? Can one really expect that they will faithfully adhere to research protocols that might require, for example, complete abstinence from alcohol? Can one really expect accurate answers on surveys meant to define their clinical outcomes?  There are numerous threats to the validity of trails conducted on poor, vulnerable, often psychotic or drug or alcohol addicted patients.

Cost-Cutting CROs and Shoddy Research

However, it is unlikely that contract research organizations who recruit such patients and run such studies are really up to implementing these complex, detailed, exacting protocols. Consider this narrative by Dr Elliott,

I visited a research unit at Lourdes Medical Center of Burlington County in Willingboro, New Jersey. The unit was operated by CRI Worldwide, the same company that Burns told me he had spoken with. (The company is now known as CRI Lifetree.) Its focus was on inpatient Phase I trials, which often involve gradually increasing the dose of a drug until subjects begin to feel toxic side effects. Some Phase I studies also require painful or unpleasant invasive procedures. For these reasons, the payment to subjects in Phase I trials is usually much higher than it would be for an outpatient study.

My first thought about the CRI unit: Its appearance did not exactly suggest clinical excellence. Most of the furniture looked as if it had been rescued from a Salvation Army store. Homemade notices with titles such as 'Smoke breaks' and 'Money requests' hung on the walls. No studies seemed to be going on, but a few people were wandering around or watching television, presumably waiting to be screened or assessed.. 

It was in this unit that a patient named Walter Jorden died. Dr Elliott narrated the events that took place before his death. Note that,

according to Jeffrey Fierstein, a cardiologist retained as an expert witness by Jorden’s family, the physicians involved deviated from expected standards of care by not more seriously considering the possibility that Jorden was having a heart attack. In Fierstein’s opinion, they not only ignored classic signs of a heart attack, but also neglected to perform an EKG and missed the opportunity to give Jorden the clot-busting drugs that might have saved his life. As Fierstein points out, 'My understanding is that it [the emergency department] was around the corner; it was right there.'

In addition, a companion article by Peter Aldhous  suggested that CROs and the drug, device and biotechnology companies that employ them are willing to allow physicians with questionable backgrounds to run clinical research. He found that a not insignificant minority of physicians listed as in charge of trials in a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) database had records of dubious conduct, including various sanctions by state medical boards. He focused on one physician who had run trials since the 1980s, starting with Lovelace Scientific Resources. His record included one-year probation for drug issues, a diagnostic omission described by the medical board as "grossly negligent," then a three-year probation for that and other clinical care problems, then a license suspension, then finally license cancellation. Throughout all the years involved he continued to run clinical trials. In general, Mr Aldhous wrote,

My trawl netted dozens of doctors selected to work on clinical trials over the past five years who had previously been censured by state medical boards. Thousands of doctors are hired each year to test experimental drugs, making this a small minority. But most doctors have clean records, so companies should have few problems finding recruits without red flags against their name. 

His conclusion was,

After spending months in the world of clinical trials, I’m left with an impression of a system that has evolved beyond the FDA’s ability to manage it. I’ve also been struck by the profound disconnect between the disciplinary system that governs everyday medicine, and the separate regulations meant to protect clinical trial volunteers.

Speed and efficiency seem to be what matters to industry, and at times these factors appear to trump concerns about the doctors who run trials. 'The whole thing is profit driven,' says Michael Carome at Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. 'You can see where corners might be cut, looking the other way when there might be concerns about an investigator.'

Some experts argue that the FDA’s entire rulebook for clinical trials, with its talk of things like 'institutional' review boards, reflects the academic past of clinical research—not today’s industrial juggernaut of for-profit clinical trials firms and for-hire review boards, which oversee a workforce of doctors drawn from regular medical practice. 'They are regulations for a world that doesn’t exist anymore,' says Elizabeth Woeckner, president of Citizens for Responsible Care and Research, which campaigns for the safety of medical research volunteers.

Again, this is similar to results of previous journalistic investigations of contract research organizations (some examples are here), going back to the Bloomberg article we discussed in 2005, and what Dr Elliott wrote in White Coat, Black Hat.  Thus we need to be extremely skeptical of the validity of clinical research implemented by contract research organizations, especially when the research subjects are vulnerable. 

Summary - Another Set of Threats to the Integrity of the Clinical Research Base

So given the push to do research rapidly at the lowest cost, the lack of supervision and regulation by the FDA, the hiring of physicians with problematic backgrounds, the willingness to take vulnerable patients desperately motivated by money, can we trust that the nice, clean, detailed descriptions of clinical trials implemented by contract research organizations presented in research articles and trial registries have anything to do with the reality of what went on? If not, what then should we make of the validity of the results of such trials?

This is compounded by our inability to tell who actually implemented any given trial.  While articles in most major clinical journals will list what companies sponsored trials, and whether the official paper authors had financial relationships with these companies, the articles do not describe who actually implemented the trials, or disclose whether contract research organizations were involved.

So the first obvious reform would be to require trial reports to disclose involvement of contract research organizations, and perhaps to list the personnel who actually were most responsible for implementing studies in addition to listed authors.

We already have discussed repeatedly how clinical research sponsored by organizations with interests in the outcomes favoring their products and service may be manipulated, and may be suppressed if even such manipulation fails to produce desired results.  We usually have assumed, however, that the published trial reports are generally accurate in their descriptions of trial implementation.  If they are not accurate, particularly because vulnerable subjects may say or do anything to stay in trials that pay them, and sometimes because of poorly qualified or impaired physicians running trials, this adds another layer of questions about the validity of commercially sponsored research.  This is yet another reason to ask whether we need to take research on human subjects meant to evaluate commercial products or services out of the hands of the companies that make those products and provide those services.