US Senator Charles Grassley called Friday for the National Institutes of Health to boost its efforts to compel public disclosure of results from human experiments, citing a jump in researchers’ compliance with a federal reporting law in response to a recent STAT investigation on the widespread failure of scientists to share clinical trial outcomes.
Earlier this week, the NIH said that in December and January, researchers had reported results for 25 percent more clinical trials than during the same period a year earlier, and attributed the improvement partly to the STAT coverage.
“It’s good news that media disclosure encouraged more reporting of clinical trial results. Investigative reporting deserves a lot of credit for affecting action in many fields. But NIH shouldn’t rely on media coverage to do its job here,” Grassley, an Iowa Republican and longtime advocate of openness in clinical research, said in a written statement.
