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 Megan Molteni and Anil Oza, STAT | 10.07.2025
For two years, a panel of scientific experts, clinicians, and patient advocates had been hammering out ways to increase community engagement in National Institutes of Health-funded science. When they presented their road map to the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya last...
By Shoumita Dasgupta, STAT | 10.03.2025
President Trump and health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have characterized the rise in autism diagnoses in recent years as an epidemic requiring emergency intervention.
This approach is factually wrong: The broadening definition of autism and the improvement in diagnosis...
By Abby McCloskey, The Dallas Morning News | 10.10.2025
We Texans like to do things our way — leave some hide on the fence rather than stay corralled, as goes a line in Wallace O. Chariton’s Texas dictionary This Dog’ll Hunt. Lately, I’ve been wondering what this ethos...
By Émile P. Torres, Truthdig | 10.17.2025
The Internet philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky has been predicting the end of the world for decades. In 1996, he confidently declared that the singularity — the moment at which computers become more “intelligent” than humanity — would happen in 2021, though...
