The Health Pulse

Andrew Freeman is the former Head of Medical Policy and Data Disclosure Governance at GlaxoSmithKline. Andrew joined Greg recently to discuss his experience at the forefront of the industry initiative to make patient-level data from clinical trials available for research. Andrew believes the results of clinical studies in humans should be made available for three key reasons. First, there are excellent scientific reasons to allow other researchers to review and evaluate findings and to make those findings available so that they can potentially lead to new discoveries. Secondly, there is an ethical obligation because when patients agree to participate in clinical research they do so for the betterment of medicine and science, and publishing is a way to maximize that effect. Thirdly because clinical research directly relates to health care interventions that are used in patients, it’s important that all the information on the benefits and risks of that intervention are made available to providers. The industry as a whole has made great strides in this area, but there are also opportunities for further transparency. For example, there are opportunities to improve access to scientific research and papers for patients. Additionally, the data should be shared in a way that is relevant and useable to those who want to access it. Anonymizing data is also hugely important when sharing data to protect the privacy of patient participants, so that’s an important consideration. Andrew shares some of the developments in the industry in the past decade that have made data sharing more beneficial and imperative for pharmaceutical sponsors. Finally, Andrew gives us his thoughts on the success of the data sharing movement to date and where the movement is headed in the future. 

All presentations represent the opinions of the presenter and do not represent the position or the opinion of SAS.