By Clinical Informatics News Staff

December 11, 2017 | Bioethics International announced the second publication of its Good Pharma Scorecard ("GPS"), an annual index ranking large pharmaceutical companies and new drugs on their clinical trial transparency, in BMJ Open. Bioethics International is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to raising the bar on ethics, trustworthiness, and patient-centricity in pharma.

Two of eleven ranked companies—Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi—achieved the highest overall clinical trial transparency scores, both scoring 100%. AbbVie, Celgene, Merck, and Astra Zeneca all scored at or above the industry median.  

The 2017 GPS ranking evaluates clinical trial registration, results reporting, clinical study report synopsis sharing, and journal article publication rates for new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2014 that were sponsored by large drug companies. Bioethics International is the first organization to consistently measure large pharma companies and their FDA-approved drugs on their clinical trial transparency performance. This learning system helps advance high-quality, patient-centric, and ethical healthcare innovation, medical evidence, and drug development. 

The 2017 GPS shows meaningful progress has been made on several key metrics since the first Scorecard was released in 2015: the proportion of new drugs with all phase 2 or 3 trials disclosed from their NDAs went up from 50% in the 2015 rankings to 67%, and the public availability of results for trials conducted in patients for each drug, went up from a median of 87% to 96%, measured at 13 months post FDA approval. Disclosure rates for trials in patients were 65% at FDA approval and improved significantly by 3 months post FDA approval (85%).

There was little change in transparency levels for the "all trials" standard, which included evaluating phase I trials conducted in healthy volunteers; the median proportion of all trials with public results went from 65% to 68%.

"We created the GPS to help advance trustworthiness and ethics in the pharmaceutical sector, by setting clear ethics standards and benchmarking the performance of companies against those standards every year," said Jennifer E. Miller, founder of Bioethics International and lead author on the paper, in a press release. "This year's Scorecard shows clear corporate leaders in clinical trial transparency and industry improvement on several metrics. We hope this improvement continues year after year, because clinical trial transparency is critical for advancing innovation, respect for trial participants, and patient health."