Stepping into the Data Frontier
By Bill, SVP, GSK Medical Affairs
Stepping into the data frontier
By Bill, SVP, GSK Medical Affairs
GSK recently took a big step forward in sharing some very valuable data with scientists around the world. We launched a website where researchers can request access to anonymised patient-level data that sit behind the results of our clinical trials.
These data represent a tremendous contribution by patients to clinical trials in the hopes of advancing healthcare and medicine. It also represents years of scientific research and the collective wisdom of employees around the world who gathered, organized and analyzed the data.
What will this mean for patients? It means scientists have a new place to look for trends to pursue in their own research. We are optimistic there will be many opportunities to accelerate research and to better focus that research so that all of us in the healthcare system can improve patient care. This data will also allow external scientists to further validate our trial results.
This system is new and we expect that our approach will evolve over time. We're committed to take learnings from the experiences of researchers using the system to improve it. The system provides access to GSK's data and we hope to see the development of a broader system where anonymised patient level data from clinical studies conducted by industry and academia are made available to further scientific research, increase understanding of new and current medicines and ultimately improve patient care.
This made me proud as a physician-researcher. GSK is the first pharmaceutical company to take this step. We already post summary protocols about each clinical trial that we start. We also provide summary results of all clinical trials--whether positive or negative--on a website accessible to all. We also seek publication of the results of all our clinical trials in peer-reviewed scientific journals. And we were the first pharmaceutical company to sign up to the AllTrials campaign for clinical data transparency by committing in February 2013 to make our clinical study reports (CSRs) publicly available.
I hope you'll take a look at this new website and, if you are a researcher, I hope you're as excited about this new opportunity as I am.
About GlaxoSmithKline
GlaxoSmithKline – one of the world’s leading research-based pharmaceutical and healthcare companies – is committed to improving the quality of human life by enabling people to do more, feel better and live longer. For further information go to us.gsk.com, follow us on twitter.com/GSKUS or visit our blog (www.morethanmedicine.us.gsk.com/blog/).
