A leading senior Australian gastroenterologist has hit back at suggestions she and her fellow researchers had been unethical in the course of a project that looked at the benefits to patients of compassionate access to anti-TNFs for ulcerative colitis.
She says it is time researchers and clinicians stopped tiptoeing around the issue of the pharma industry and its important role in clinical research.
“A lot of people are afraid to talk about it for fear of being labelled as in the back pocket of pharma,” Professor Jane Andrews told the limbic.
The head of IBD Service and Education at the Royal Adelaide Hospital’s department of gastroenterology and hepatology was involved with the original study published in the Internal Medicine Journal last year.
In a letter published in a subsequent issue of the same journal, an author who was unidentified and known only as ‘J Niall’ from Melbourne, raised questions relating to the study’s conflict of interest (COI) statements.
Dr Andrews and her fellow authors have now had their response to the letter published in the Internal Medicine Journal, and she did not hold back.
“COI are an important issue as they are impossible to avoid completely and so reducing discussion of COI to a letter in which inaccurate statements are made and deceitful conduct implied is not helpful,” she and her fellow authors wrote.
Their extended letter addressed the issues raised by the Niall, strongly objecting to implications they had acted unethically, and subjected him to a taste of his own medicine.