Making Clinical Data Widely Available

摘要

Last summer, statistician andrew Vickers e-mailed the lead author of a paper on a large clinical trial to ask for the underlying raw data set. Vickers wanted to explore whether he could predict which patients were at risk for stroke, a side effect of the drug being tested. He got a short reply, one he has heard many times before: The data are not available. "It's just the knee-jerk refusal to share data," says Vickers, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Vickers wasn't surprised by the response or the lack of explanation. But he's become so frustrated by such experiences that he penned an essay in the New York Times in January that called for making data from cancer trials freely available. Clinical researchers should get over their reluctance to share, according to Vickers; he and some others say they should emulate basic researchers who routinely deposit gene sequences in GenBank. "We need an attitude shift," Vickers says.