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 Charles Schmidt, Undark | 09.25.2026
In 2010, scientists at the University of Tokyo and other institutions reported a startling achievement: They had successfully grown a pancreas made almost entirely of rat cells within the bodies of mice. The research was directed by Hiromitsu Nakauchi, a...
By Rob Stein, NPR [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 09.29.2026
Cathy Tie slips on a white lab coat bearing her name and the logo of her startup: Origin Genomics. "Welcome!" she says as she leads an NPR reporter, photographer and videographer on an exclusive tour of Origin's labs located...
By Erik Adams, Sundance | 09.08.2026
The scariest movie playing at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival isn’t about cursed audio recordings or a killer demon disguised as your true love; rather it’s a 110-minute essay film about how a handful of guys obsessed with numbers and...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a major focus of news recently, as it should have been, under the appropriately ridiculous name of Hugging Face, “a leading collaboration platform and community hub for machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science.” In July, Hugging Face was hacked. The platform itself responded:
Earlier this week, we detected and responded to an intrusion into part of our production infrastructure. This one was different from anything we had handled before in one important way...
