Stricter rules aimed at curbing purported conflicts of interest between Harvard Medical School faculty and healthcare companies will be implemented after January 1 in an attempt to prevent companies from using Harvard’s esteemed reputation for brand marketing. Most affected by the new policy will be Pri-Med, an annual Boston conference for primary care doctors featuring Harvard-taught courses, which pharmaceutical companies use as an opportunity to hold their own industry symposium for product marketing.
The crusade against the collaboration of science and industry has adverse consequences that often go under the radar, according to ACSH’s Jeff Stier. “What many fail to recognize is that the relationships between universities and pharmaceutical companies are essential to the development of new drugs, but no one’s paying attention to this huge downside of interfering with that delicate partnership.”
ACSH trustee Dr. Thomas Stossel, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, is a stalwart in standing up against the one-sided conflict-of-interest campaign, writing in The Wall Street Journal last year that leading research organizations routinely build bridges with industry leaders:
Meanwhile, each new barrier -- such as the National Institutes of Health's ban on paid consulting for industry -- erected between publicly funded researchers and companies, especially cash-strapped start-ups where many of the breakthroughs occur, slows the progress of potential treatments.