New study shows bias in animal trials
US and UK researches have discovered animal trials are riddled with bias and as a consequence allow too many treatments to advance to human trials. Many experts are now calling for greater peer review of raw data.

New study shows bias in animal trials
US and UK researches have discovered animal trials are riddled with bias and as a consequence allow too many treatments to advance to human trials. Many experts are now calling for greater peer review of raw data.
Source: PM | Duration: 3min 25sec
MARK COLVIN: The pharmaceutical industry has been under increasing pressure from some scientists and doctors in recent years about the reliability of its drug tests.
Now British and American researchers have come up with a startling finding that suggests that many animal trials of drugs may be next to useless.
In one example they found that only 5 per cent of a group of 160 studies were actually unbiased.
Mary Ann Jolley reports.
MARY ANN JOLLEY: We may like hearing of medical advancements in the treatment of some of our most debilitating diseases, but it seems good news may be short-lived.
A group of researchers in the United States and United Kingdom combined forces to study the accuracy of animal trials, and what they discovered is alarming. According to their study, animal trials are riddled with bias.
JOHN lOANNIDIS: We tried to see whether the results that are published in the literature seem to be reliable or they are too good to be true. And practically what find is that there is just too many significant results; far more than one would expect. This suggests that's there's substantial bias in that literature.
MARY ANN JOLLEY: Dr John loannidis is a professor of medicine at the University of Stanford. The team he led assessed the results of more than 4,000 animal trials that contributed to 160 studies of potential treatments for neurological diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and stroke.
They concluded that only 8 of the 160 studies were unbiased and should have advanced to human trials.
JOHN lOANNIDIS: It's a very common problem - that we have lots of promising results in the scientific literature as far as animal studies are concerned. But then when we move to human experimentation, most of these interventions fail.
MARY ANN JOLLEY: Dr Ioannidis and his team didn't review any Australian animal trials, but he believes researchers throughout the world come under the same pressure to produce positive results to their experiments, and this ultimately is seriously detrimental to medicine.
JOHN lOANNIDIS: There could be a number of paradigm shifts that could happen. One mig