
Senators call on NIH to take action on slow-to-report clinical trial sponsors
With tens of billions in annual appropriations, a group of four Republican senators is publicly wondering why the National Institutes of Health can’t do a better job of ensuring taxpayer-funded research is published in a timely manner, they said in a letter sent last week to NIH acting director Lawrence Tabak.
The letter comes as a recent HHS inspector general report found that 72 clinical trials requiring results to be submitted in 2019 or 2020 were submitted on time, late or not submitted at all. While NIH concurred with the August report’s recommendations and said it would take steps to address them, the senators are curious as to what exactly NIH is doing on the matter.
“When American taxpayers spend billions of dollars on federal programs, they expect accountability, transparency, and results,” Sens. Marsha Blackburn (TN), Chuck Grassley (IA), Roger Marshall (KS) and Ron Johnson (MO) wrote. “HHS OIG’s report makes clear that the NIH must do more to hold grant recipients accountable, so that the public is able to access timely clinical trial results.”
They also sought a list from NIH of the 37 grant recipients that failed to comply with federal and NIH reporting requirements in 2019 and 2020. And for the 21 researchers who failed to comply with federal reporting requirements but were allowed to begin new NIH-funded trials before submitting the results of their previous clinical trials, the senators want to know how much the NIH gave them.
Till Bruckner, founder of the nonprofit TranspariMED, which is working to register and fully report clinical trials, said in a statement:
Finally, U.S. policy makers are waking up to the immense cost of research waste in publicly funded clinical trials. TranspariMED looks forward to learning how many NIH-funded trials have failed to comply with federal and NIH reporting requirements since 2007, and what NIH will do to ensure that their results are made publicly available.