Bayer Healthcare Joins Clinical Data Portal

Bayer HealthCare says it will begin sharing data from its clinical trials with qualified researchers through a common Internet portal called Clinical Study Data Request. The portal is sponsored by member firms including Boehringer Ingelheim, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi, and Novartis. By joining the portal, Bayer HealthCare says it is supporting efforts of the European Medicines Agency to increase the transparency of data from clinical trials. Scientists will be granted access to the data after approval of a research proposal by an independent scientific review panel. Researchers will be able to access data on medicines and indications that have been approved by U.S. and European Union regulatory agencies on or after Jan. 1, 2014. Bayer HealthCare already provides information via its website on trials it sponsors dating back to 2005. Meanwhile, Boehringer Ingelheim has begun making clinical data on approved drugs and data on terminated research programs accessible to drug researchers via its website.