- Sponsors might be compelled to select academic centers as sites due to the presence of key opinion leaders or specific patient populations.
- Ethical and Regulatory Requirements
- Academic institutions can take their responsibility to provide ethical and regulatory oversight to extremes and create excessive barriers to conducting clinical trials.
- One study found that the average number of steps necessary to open a clinical trial at academic centers was over 110, in contrast to fewer than 60 steps at non-academic centers.
- Low Priority of Clinical Research in Academic Institutions
- Many academic medical centers undervalue or fail to incentivize clinical research.
- Fundamental principles of clinical research are not included in academic medical curricula at the graduate or undergraduate level.
- Those studying to be physicians are not adequately trained to interpret clinical trial results, impairing their ability to use such results to inform their clinical care and practice evidence-based medicine. For example, in a survey of 367 residents only 37.4 percent knew how to interpret an adjusted odds ratio from a multivariate regression analysis.
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