How does commercial funding influence medical research?

Question

in good and bad ways. what are they?

Answer 1

That is a hard question to answer because there is so much medical research of so many different types.

By commercial funding, you probably mean funding for research provided as grants from companies, as opposed to internal research at the companies or venture capital funding of biotech start up companies.

Obviously, both the companies and the researchers will want to say that the companies hold no undue influence over the research in terms of results or publication.  Often when scientists publish their work, they are required to disclose any potential conflicts of interest in these regards - i.e. they will report that their research was funded by the company that makes the drug they were testing.  Sometimes these safeguards against potential fraud fail, and in fact the safeguards were instituted because of the fear of conflicts of interest and of fraudulent results.

Aside from these sort of general statements, however, I don't really have any specifics to offer you.  You can search the biomedical literature at the link below for info, and I would recommend looking for articles in magazines and newspapers as well.

Hope this helps.