Some Big Pharmas stepped up their game on data transparency — but which flunked the test?
The nonprofit Bioethics International has come out with their latest scorecard on data transparency among the big biopharmas in the industry — flagging a few standouts while spotlighting some laggards who are continuing to underperform.
Now in its third year, the nonprofit created a new set of standards with Yale School of Medicine and Stanford Law School to evaluate the track record on trial registration, results reporting, publication and data-sharing practice.

“A goal of the GPS is to help set ethics and social responsibility measures in the pharma industry and provide an independent tracking tool to both recognize best practices and catalyze reform, where needed, in companies,” said Jennifer Miller, founder of Bioethics International, assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine and lead author on the paper.
Several companies — led by Roche/Genentech, Novartis and Merck notably upped their game in this latest review of the Good Pharma Scorecard. Standouts include Novo Nordisk, which created a measure of success on providing data that is ahead of the scorecard’s standard. Offered a chance to amend their ways, AstraZeneca set out new guidelines on reporting data requests, while Novartis and Gilead added timelines on data sharing.
Still, there’s plenty of room for improvement, they add. Particularly among the companies dwelling at the bottom of the scorecard.
The laggards: Allergan — soon to be absorbed in AbbVie — is at the bottom of the list, with a poor transparency score of 46%. And that is just one step below Amgen, at 56%.
Allergan actually dropped from last year’s poor number, alongside falling scores at AstraZeneca (83%) and J&J (90%, down from 100%).