If academic discoveries turn out to be wrong, one drug company wants its money back. That’s the tough-minded proposal floated today by the chief medical officer of Merck & Co., one of the world’s 10 largest drug companies, as a way to fix the “reproducibility crisis,” or how many, if not most, published scientific reports turn out to be incorrect. Michael Rosenblatt, Merck’s executive vice president and chief medical officer, said bad results from academic labs caused pharmaceutical companies to waste millions and “threatens the entire biomedical research enterprise.” The problem of irreproducible research has been getting attention thanks partly to the efforts of a group of psychologists who have been redoing scores of classic experiments and have found most don’t mean much. Wrong results are also a problem for translational research—the kind drug companies do when they try to turn biological discoveries into actual medicines. Since companies don’t want their cash draining down ratholes, they’re among the few organizations that have taken the trouble to double-check results The results aren’t pretty. Back in 2012, the biotechnology company Amgen dropped a bomb on academic science when it said it found only six of 53 “landmark” cancer papers stood up to efforts to reproduce the results of promising new research. Other studies that drug companies say can’t be replicated include one that found a cancer drug might treat Alzheimer’s and another that showed a particular gene was linked to diabetes in mice. Rosenblatt says the costs of repeating wrong research are adding up. He says on average it takes “approximately two to six scientific personnel one to two years of work in an industry laboratory” to try to reproduce original experiments at an average cost of $500,000 to $2 million. In his editorial, published today in Science Translational Medicine, Merck’s medical chief paints a dire picture: As the public, government, and private funders of research comprehend the extent of the problem, trust in the scientific enterprise erodes, and confidence in the ability of the scientific community to address this problem wanes. In addition, there is considerable potential for reputational damage to scientists, universities, and entire fields (for example, cancer biology, genomics, and psychology). Why is science wrong so often? Merck lists the usual suspects: pressure to publish and win grants, careerism, poor training of students, and journals that don’t review reports rigorously enough. Instead of trying to fix cultural problems in labs or passing new regulations, Merck thinks some punitive economic incentives are in order, specifically, a “full or partial money-back guarantee.” That is, if research that drug companies pay for turns out to be wrong, universities would have to give back the funding they got. Merck thinks this will put the pressure right where it belongs, on the scientists.
How about a retrospective review of the decision to acquire Cubist for $9 billion? Interesting that there was absolutely no mention of either Zerbaxa or Sivextro sales in the earnings release, only Cubicin was mentioned and it goes generic in June. Merck should ask for a refund on that deal.
