In clinical trials, for-profit review boards are taking over for hospitals. Should they?
By Sheila Kaplan,
STAT
| 07. 06. 2016
For years, ethicist Arthur Caplan warned medical researchers that paying businesses to evaluate their clinical trials was a bad idea.
He condemned trials that didn’t rely on hospital or academic review boards — long the gold standard in science — and argued that for-profit review boards were out to make a buck, not protect patients.
Today, Caplan sits on the advisory board of WIRB-Copernicus Group, the largest commercial institutional review board, or IRB, in the country.
He says he had no choice.
Continue reading on STAT
Image via Flickr/AJC
Related Articles
By Pete Shanks
| 02.27.2026
Last month, we published “The Shameful Legacy of Tuskegee” which focused on a proposed experiment in Guinea-Bissau. The study’s plan echoed the notorious Tuskegee disaster, withholding safe, effective vaccines against hepatitis B from some newborns while inoculating others. It was to be financed by the U.S. but performed by a controversial Danish team. That project provoked a multi-national outcry, leading to a remarkable response from the World Health Organization:
WHO has significant concerns regarding the study’s scientific...
By Jenn White, NPR | 02.26.2026
By Kiana Jackson and Shannon Stubblefield, New Disabled South | 02.09.2026
"MC0_8230" via Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by 2.0
This report documents a deliberate assault on disabled people in the United States. Not an accident. Not a series of bureaucratic missteps. An assault that has been coordinated across agencies...
By Scott Solomon, The MIT Press Reader | 02.12.2026
Chris Mason is a man in a hurry.
“Sometimes walking from the subway to the lab takes too long, so I’ll start running,” he told me over breakfast at a bistro near his home in Brooklyn on a crisp...
