Research funded by drug companies is ‘biased’: “Research funded by drug companies is more likely to produce results that favour the sponsor’s product, reveals a new study.

Researchers analysed 30 previous reports examining pharmaceutical industry-backed research and found the conclusions of such research were four times more likely to be positive than research backed by other sponsors.” New Scientist And lest we forget, there is a more fundamental bias in the reporting of research findings — that positive results (confirming a research hypothesis) are far more likely to be reported than negative (disconfirmatory) ones. This alone may go a long way to explain the bias in pharmaceutical-funded research, since a researcher seeking a grant is more likely to ‘pitch’ a favorable hypothesis to them.