The Food and Drug Administration is increasingly relying on a big data system that can search through the medical records of approximately 180 million Americans to detect unforeseen problems with approved drugs that are on the market. It’s a new approach that’s potentially powerful, but the devil is in the details of how the searches get done. The FDA is collaborating with a nonprofit that’s now studying how to best do this type of work–but NPR learned that its research effort is entirely funded by pharmaceutical companies. That raises questions of a conflict of interest that could limit how this new technique gets used to detect hidden dangers linked to the drugs in consumers’ medical cabinets.
