Scientific work in the pharmaceutical industry belongs to a commercial organisation and is at the same time subject to the rules of scientific method. These two frames need not conflict; they conflict when the boundary between them is left undefined.
Separating the functions
Separating Medical Affairs from commercial functions is not an organisational formality. The separation protects which question a piece of scientific content answers: the scientific function answers "what does the data show", the commercial function answers "how is this product positioned". Where the two merge in one text without distinction, a reader cannot tell which question was answered.
Obligations of transparency
What carries credibility in industry-supported scientific work is this:
- Registering the study before enrolment begins
- Publishing studies whose results are unfavourable as well as those that are not
- Stating the authors' access to data and their ability to verify the analysis
- Disclosing who held the decision to publish
- Declaring the funding source and any writing support
What these have in common is that none of them changes a result. All of them make a result independently appraisable.
Publication bias
The oldest criticism directed at industry-supported research is a tendency not to publish unfavourable results. Prospective registration answers that directly: a study registered but unpublished remains visible at least in its existence. Differences between the registered endpoint and the published one become traceable in the same way.
Scientific exchange with clinicians
The quality of scientific exchange shows in how questions are answered. Keeping an answer within the known data, not suggesting a use that has not been demonstrated, and saying plainly where data does not exist are what make such exchange scientific. "There is not enough data on this" is not a weakness of scientific communication but a requirement of it.
Separating education from promotion
Keeping educational content distinct from promotional content lets an audience know in what frame to weigh what they are hearing. Where the funding source, who determined the content, and the speaker's relationships are all stated, educational content does not lose its value by having been supported.
The individual dimension of responsibility
Organisational rules are necessary but not sufficient. That the person writing, presenting or approving a text acts knowing the limits of the data is a responsibility no compliance process can replace. Scientific credibility is the accumulation of individual decisions.
This is a general scientific information article; it is not an original research publication and does not constitute individual medical advice.