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Jan 30 (Reuters) - Johnson & Johnson has selectedthe Yale School of Medicine to review requests frominvestigators and physicians looking for access to clinicaltrial data involving the diversified healthcare company'spharmaceuticals.
Under the agreement, the "Yale Open Data Access Project," will independently review and make final decisions regarding allrequests for information on the company's drug clinical trials,including anonymous patient data.
The action comes amid growing pressure from outsidescientists for access to raw data from clinical trials,reflecting general concerns that too many studies cannot beindependently confirmed and may well be wrong. [ID:n L2N0KX18S]
J&J, which sells drugs including blood thinner Xarelto andprostate cancer treatment Zytiga, said it is in the process ofdetermining how best to share trial data from its other twoareas of operation: medical devices and consumer products.
"This is a multi-year effort on our part to try tocontribute to advancing medical knowledge and science," JoanneWaldstreicher, J&J's chief medical officer, said in a telephoneinterview.
Others drugmakers have made similar moves. Britain'sGlaxoSmithkline Plc has set up an online system toprovide researchers with access to anonymous patient-level dataabout its medicines.
Pfizer Inc said in December it would broaden accessto information from its clinical trials to independentresearchers and to patients who take part in the studies.
Pfizer also set up an independent review panel of academicscientists to decide which researcher requests it would answer.
