By Jacob Goldstein
"Sometimes it seems like everybody has financial ties to the drug or device industry. As it turns out, it’s only a little more than half of everybody.
A survey conducted in 2006-07 and published this week in the journal Health Affairs found that 53% of academic research faculty in the life sciences at top schools reported financial ties to industry.
About a third of the respondents said they had served as consultants, nearly a quarter said they had been paid speakers and 20% said they had received research funding from industry. That last figure is down from 28% of researchers who said they received research funding from industry in a similar survey conducted in 1995.
The authors suggest a number of possible causes of the drop in researchers who said they got industry funding for research, including a big increase in NIH research funding since 1995 and more scrutiny of academic-industry ties.
(Speaking of that scrutiny, you might want to take a look at a story in this morning’s New York Times that describes how the big health-care bills in both houses of Congress would require industry to report payments to doctors.)"
Read more at WSJ Blog
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