Illustration: Rebecca Zisser/Axios
Federal officials are doing little or nothing to enforce a 2017 law that requires drugmakers and researchers to log their clinical trials into a federal database, according to an investigation published in Science.
Why it matters: The law was designed to give the public, along with outside researchers, more access to information about drugs' safety and efficacy.
The findings: Researchers failed to comply with these disclosure mandate about 55% of the time, leaving the results of 4,700 trials unpublished.
- "Missing or late results offer potentially vital information for the most desperate patients," Science's Charles Piller writes.
Go deeper: Drugmakers opt to mine medical data in lieu of lengthy clinical trials