Unpacking the public-private gap in the application of 'omics' technologies: A socio-ethical analysis of pharmacogenomics research funding

Pharmacogenomics is the study of the role of genetic make up in person-to-person differences in drug response. Pharmacogenomics is heralded as one of the new health technologies that share the goal of achieving personalized therapeutics, instead of the traditional 'one-size-fits-all' suboptimal drug treatment regimens. There is a growing body of bioethics, health policy and social science research literature suggesting, however, that the large pharmaceutical companies may be preferentially in favor of pharmacogenomics applications towards basic biological research (e.g., new drug discovery) but have serious misgivings about using these technologies to individually-tailor drug treatments due to the potential fragmentation of the pharmaceutical market. We hypothesize that published clinical pharmacogenomics association studies funded by big pharma will display a tendency towards publishing less significant or negative association studies, compared to reports funded by public resources. Our research plan will identify all clinical pharmacogenomics association studies published in leading specialist journals over the past decade. Quantitative statistics will be performed to evaluate the influence of research funding source (i.e., public or private) on likelihood of publication of a significant clinical pharmacogenomics association. Additionally, we will conduct a qualitative study through an interview of the senior or lead authors of the published clinical pharmacogenomics studies in public and private domains, with a view to identify the values, interests and mechanisms by which research funding source may (or may not) influence reporting of clinical pharmacogenomics findings. Thus, the present study will suggest ways forward for how best to develop health policies that take into account the source of research funding in clinical pharmacogenomics and more broadly, in personalized therapeutics.