Clinical trials that are actually marketing ploys targeting doctors – how seeding trials put profit over patients

Some industry-funded clinical trials show signs of being designed to market drugs rather than to test them for their safety and effectiveness. Detecting these studies remains difficult.

By: Sukhun Kang, University of California, Santa Barbara, The Conversation

Outlets: The Conversation

Published: May 6, 2026

Words: 1,467

Last Updated: 2 months, 3 weeks ago

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By Sukhun Kang, University of California, Santa Barbara

Some clinical trials aren’t designed to answer scientific questions. They’re designed to market drugs. In our recently published research, my team and I analyzed over 34,000 industry-funded trials and found that hundreds of studies across seven medical fields were likely designed to promote a drug to physicians rather than to generate scientific data. For some fields, nearly 1% of clinical trials were for marketing purposes.

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