Some clinical trials aren’t designed to answer scientific questions. They’re designed to market drugs. In our recently published research, my team and I analyzed over 34,000 industry-funded trials and found that hundreds of studies across seven medical fields were likely designed to promote a drug to physicians rather than to generate scientific data. For some fields, nearly 1% of clinical trials were for marketing purposes.

Known as seeding trials, these studies prioritize marketing over science while disguising their commercial purpose as legitimate research. Pharmaceutical companies use them to familiarize physicians with new products under the guise of data collection. Participants sign consent forms, believing they are contributing to medical knowledge.

In reality, patients are absorbing risks that serve corporate interests rather than resolving genuine uncertainty about the therapeutic potential of a drug.

The term seeding trial first entered the medical literature in 1994, when then-commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration David Kessler and his colleagues described such studies as attempts to entice doctors to prescribe new drugs through trials that appear to serve little scientific purpose.

Three decades later, the problem of seeding trials persists.

How seeding trials work

While the structure of a seeding trial looks similar to legitimate clinical trials on the surface, the objectives are different.

In a typical clinical trial, researchers recruit patients across clinics and hospitals to test whether a treatment is safe and effective.

In contrast, the pharmaceutical company behind a seeding trial enrolls large numbers of physicians at many sites, each seeing only a few patients. The goal is exposure: getting doctors to prescribe the drug, not generating robust data. Doctors may be selected based on their prescribing volume rather than their research credentials.

In a legitimate trial, the number of study sites reflects the number of patients needed to answer a scientific question. In a seeding trial, the number of sites reflects the number of doctors the company wants to reach.

Seeding trials often target drugs already........

© The Conversation