Medical Writing Bias in Myeloma Clinical Research | James Berenson, MD | ASH 2023

I'm Jim Berenson, medical and scientific director of the Institute for Myeloma and Bone Cancer Research in West Hollywood, California. It's my pleasure tonight to share your results, not of a clinical trial, but a study in which we looked at all of the clinical trials that had been done since 2000 with 10 drugs that are used to treat myeloma, the common drugs used to treat myeloma, and over time what happens to those papers in terms of whether the medical writing is done by either an employee of the drug company or directly paid by the drug company, which obviously has implications on whether those trials are reported in an unbiased manner. And so what we observed, interestingly, is 2000, 2005, nothing, 2007, 2008, we're starting to see that infiltrate the journals, and by God, in 2023, nearly half of the articles published on clinical trials involving drugs and myeloma, the medical writing is paid by the drug company, either directly as an employee or indirectly. There's a lot of implications in terms of the unbiased nature in which reporting is done and certainly really important in terms of unbiased reporting or not regarding side effects of drugs. And I think this is important to recognize and probably do something about. We need to make literature unbiased, not biased, and certainly we have to have the appearance of unbiased literature, which can occur if medical writing is directly paid by the investigators who pick writers of their own choosing, not of the drug company's choosing, to help them write manuscripts. I think that will really give us better literature to help patients.