NIH toughens enforcement of delayed clinical trials reporting
Last year, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) delivered a stern warning to two in-house clinical researchers who had broken an important rule. They had failed to submit the results of two clinical trials they had overseen to ClinicalTrials.gov, a database meant to inform the public about human studies and their results. The reporting requirement has often been ignored, but this time the agency took an unprecedented step: It told the scientists it wouldn’t approve any more of their research until they fell in line. After that warning and other agency actions, the pair complied, well after the 1-year deadline. The episode, described in a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published in April, adds to other, systematic changes NIH has...