FT Health: Research pledge must go further

Leading funders and researchers this week agreed that all their clinical trials for vaccines and devices would in future be publicly registered and the results published. The pledge -- made by nearly a dozen groups including the Wellcome Trust and the UK Medical Research Council -- is a boost for innovation and safety. Some estimates suggest that half of all trial findings, notably those that do not yield positive results, are not made public. This is a significant waste of research, burying information that could help to better direct future work, reduce dangers to patients and boost efficiency. In an era of big data and partnership between medical research and IT, there is considerable potential to improve number crunching and identify patterns in trial data.