How to reduce corruption in drug and medical research

Health
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Currently wealthy drug companies will perform multiple parallel research efforts and cherrypick those efforts which indicate the drug they have patented is most effective, and discard the research efforts which indicate the drug is ineffective.

By this method, they are able to get FDA approval despite having an ineffective product.

In order to combat this, do the following steps:

  1. Require any federally recognized research to request a unique ‘public research id’ from a new online database provided to researchers. Log the time stamp that the record is created as well as the initial name of the research project.

  2. The research group can later change the name of the project and description, but the original name must be logged and the history of the name and description must be provided to reviewers as public information.

  3. In order to secure federal funding for a research project, t he federal research grant must reference the unique id in step 1. When FDA or the public reviews the research, they should be able to search for all related research by the same principal investigator and its organization. In that fashion, if they initiated multiple ‘skeleton projects’ that should come up in database search.

In that fashion, it should be quickly apparent when organizations conducted misleading cherrypicked research.

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Here is an example:
Suppose Principal Investigator Chao Fan wants to run a drug trial on Drug X.
Chao goes to the national online database, logs in with their user id, and requests to create a new trial. Chao enters a brief description, such as ‘drug trial for Alzheimer drug’, enters a brief summary description such as ‘10 subject trial of Alzheimer drug’. The system gives Chao unique id # 1138. Chao then applies for a research grant, referencing id #1138. Chao wins the award, runs the study, and finds a significant efficacy, and updates the title to ‘Initial Research on Alzheimer Drug X’. Then during FDA review, study 1138 is listed. The FDA and the public, can then review the original history, which said ‘10 subject trial of Alzheimer drug’, when it was created, and the other research projects of Chao.

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Furthermore, the record could have a data entry field where the PI (Principal Investigator) should be able to enter any Provisional Patent #'s or Patent #'s that will be used in the study. Then when the FDA reviews the study, they can confirm that the study began referencing that patent #, and the public and the FDA, can search for all uses and instances of that patent # in any study, across all researchers (so the wealthy drug company cannot simply repeat the study with a different researcher).