The European Medicines Agency (EMA) recently began providing open access to clinical data for new medicines for human use authorised in the European Union (EU).
Professor David Webb, President of the British Pharmacological Society, comments:
“The publication of these reports by the European Medicines Agency is likely to have a significant impact on patients, pharmacologists and clinical pharmacologists around the world. The reports offer us new opportunities for increasing the effectiveness of clinical trial design and minimising the risk to volunteers and patients who participate in clinical studies. The British Pharmacological Society advocates for improved openness and transparency in research, and since 2013 the Society has been a supporter of the AllTrials campaign, which calls for the publication of clinical study reports from all clinical trials – past, present and future. The Society continues to call for the peer-review publication of data across all phases of drug discovery and development, and our jointly published journal, Pharmacology Research & Perspectives, provides an excellent method for researchers to publish so-called negative findings."