Monday, July 25, 2016

In Clinical Trials, For-Profit Review Boards Are Taking over for Hospitals. Should They?

STAT News
July 6, 2016

For years, ethicist Arthur Caplan warned medical researchers that paying businesses to evaluate their clinical trials was a bad idea.

He condemned trials that didn’t rely on hospital or academic review boards — long the gold standard in science — and argued that for-profit review boards were out to make a buck, not protect patients.

Today, Caplan sits on the advisory board of WIRB-Copernicus Group, the largest commercial institutional review board, or IRB, in the country.

He says he had no choice.

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