Washington DC

An international group of medical editors is challenging several leading pharmaceutical companies, saying that their reporting of clinical trials is deliberately incomplete.

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors made their complaint in an editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine, published online on 23 May. They argue that leading pharmaceutical companies are obeying the letter but not the spirit of a 1997 law that requires the public registration of ongoing trials involving serious or life-threatening illnesses.

The government-maintained registry, http://www.clinicaltrials.gov, is intended to help patients find information about clinical trials. But the editors say that drug firms are inserting a “meaningless phrase” instead of the names of drugs, so patients aren't getting the full picture, including any negative data.

The New England journal's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Drazen, says that Merck, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Pfizer in particular “didn't meet the sniff test” in a review conducted early this month by Deborah Zarin, the database's director. Zarin found that specific drug names were missing in scores of trials, which used the phrase “investigational drug” to describe their products. Drugs weren't named in 36% of 75 Pfizer studies reviewed, in 53% of 55 GSK trials, and in 90% of 132 Merck trials.

Drazen argues that patients deserve more. “It's not right,” he says.

The drug companies insist that they are trying to make the reporting of results as transparent as possible. They claim they are complying with the law, which does not explicitly require companies to name drugs, but asks them to describe the “intervention” being used. “We think we've made big strides in improving the transparency of clinical data. And we will continue to do so,” says GSK spokesman Rick Koenig.

Pfizer's spokeswoman Betsy Raymond says her company withholds the names of certain drugs for competitive reasons. Merck did not return a call seeking comment.

The editors' committee wants to see trials being publicly registered in a meaningful way, partly so that negative results about particular drugs can be accessed. They have defined a list of minimum criteria that companies must provide. And this summer, the editors will start refusing to publish trials that do not register this information. The editorial “is a message that we are paying close attention”, says Drazen.