Drug discovery is an expensive, bureaucracy-laced process. Due to more restrictions requiring a lot more trials, drug discovery is an average 14 year process costing $2 billion and only 1 out of 5,000 drugs will get approved and out to the market. It's easy to imagine why once a company knows the product is not viable or safe, it is abandoned.

But a group of academics think that information should be retained and even shared - of course, they do not want to pay for any of those things so companies are unlikely to listen. They say the information is critical for effective care and protecting patients, but how? A drug that never got to market never will so it isn't protecting patients or helping care when they never have access to it.

Prof. Jonathan Kimmelman, Associate Professor of Biomedical Ethics at McGill University, is the lead author of a paper in BMJ advocating that drug companies should provide this data free of charge. "We expected to see that many of these trials are never published. What surprised us was the magnitude of the data withholding."

They found that between 2005 and 2009, the period that the researchers studied, only about 37 percent of registered trials for "stalled" drug trials were actually published. For the approved drugs developed in the same period, 75 percent of the trials were published. The real question is why 37 percent of trials were published. It shouldn't be a criticism that it is not more, it is a public service that they were published at all. They instead advocate that other researchers might find a new use. Viagra is an example of a drug that did not work for its intended use.

But drugs are under patent. Handing data over to a university is going to be pointless when any new discovery made would first have to pay off the old debt before it could even go to a clinical trial. They make two other arguments but they fall flat: That researchers will learn about animal models and experiments. The first criteria for giving over any data to anyone should be, 'do you know how an experiment works?' If they do not, they should not have data, they should go back to undergraduate school. 

The worst argument they make is that a drug that fails in one country might be approved in another. Only an ethicist could make a pharmaceutical company executive gasp in shock that a drug that is unsafe or does not work should be promoted in a developing nation.

The final argument is that patients in the trials never know what happened. Their 'altruism' is not being honored if the results are not published, the authors contend. Perhaps, but no one signs up for a trial with the proviso that they will get a copy of the results they would not understand anyway. And the authors argue that the participants should know if they took an unsafe drug, but that is just a new way for lawsuits to proceed and for new research to dry up. Drugs that are unsafe never make it to even a stage 1 clinical trial much less a stage 2.

There is only one reason a drug company should publish a stalled result - if they want to do so as community service. Nothing rings more hollow than academics clamoring that someone who has already spent tens of millions of dollars or more should do something else for free.