U.S. Medical Schools, Drug Makers Share Strong Ties

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"Supported research is fulfilling a social mandate," he said. "After all, the public support of NIH [U.S. National Institutes of Health] funding is really driven by the desire to see practical results . . . and the only way those practical results can come to pass is by having productive relationships between the discoverers of new information and the organizations that our country has established to determine whether that information can be developed into useful products for public health."

The issue of medicine's ties to industry has been a hot one of late.

One study found that third-year medical students get, on average, one gift or attend one activity sponsored by a drug maker each week. This type of marketing by pharmaceutical companies apparently begins before students enter medical school, in the weeks and months after students graduate from college.

There have also been calls recently by some doctors and academic leaders for a ban on all pharmaceutical gifts, including free meals, to doctors at academic medical centers.

There is, however, no national data to describe the extent of these institutional academic-industry relationships.

To help supply that data, Campbell and his colleagues surveyed the department chairs of 125 accredited medical schools and the 15 largest independent teaching hospitals in the United States. Of 688 eligible chairs, 459 completed the survey, for a response rate of 67 percent.

Sixty percent of department chairs reported some form of personal relationship with industry such as being a paid consultant (27 percent), a member of a scientific advisory board (27 percent), an officer or executive of a company (7 percent), a founder of a company (9 percent), a member of a board of directors (11 percent) or a paid speaker (14 percent).

Chairs of clinical departments -- such as medicine and psychiatry -- were more likely to have served on a speakers' bureau than chairs of nonclinical departments -- such as microbiology.

Two-thirds of departments had relationships with industry, with clinical departments more likely than nonclinical department to receive research equipment (17 versus 10 percent), unrestricted funds (19 percent versus 3 percent), research seminar support (36 percent versus 13 percent), support for residency and fellowship training (37 percent versus 2 percent) and support for department-administered continuing medical education (65 percent versus 3 percent).