Researchers conducting human studies of new treatments have significantly increased their public reporting of results in the last two months, the National Institutes of Health disclosed Wednesday.
The improvement suggests researchers in academia, industry, and the government may be responding to public pressure, after years of routinely failing to follow a federal law requiring they report results to an NIH database called ClinicalTrials.gov.
Deborah Zarin, director of ClinicalTrials.gov, attributed part of the improvement to a STAT investigation published in December, which for the first time named the academic medical centers and drug companies with the worst records of compliance with the reporting law. She also credited the agency’s own outreach to researchers and training efforts.
