Wall Street wants your peer review
Street Smarts. By Scott Gottlieb, MD, amednews contributor. June 18, 2001.
The professional societies that govern medicine may be heading for a showdown with the Securities and Exchange Commission when it comes to the release of market-moving information on drugs and biotechnology.
The latest spark in this simmering controversy flashed last month at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncologists. The full gaggle of medical press corps camped out at the weeklong meeting to reflexively report findings from important research presented publicly for the first time, even though results from the studies were available months before.
Each year a thick book of abstracts of studies to be presented is sent to the organization's members more than a month before the meeting, with the understanding that none of the information would be divulged to the public. This common practice of prereleasing this research springs largely from the belief that doctors attending conferences need time to preview studies to stimulate discussion.
But for the SEC and Wall Street hands, that tradition brings to light a nagging problem. Results of key medical research are often available to patients, doctors and investors. However, a tightly regulated market in the flow of this kind of information guarantees that many of them won't find out about it until much later.
Nobody can blame the medical societies for trying to protect the value of their most prized franchises, namely their meetings and their journals, but that doesn't mean Wall Street is going to sit back blithely.
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Copyright 2001 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
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