In a challenge to the pharmaceutical industry, Doctors Without Borders has revealed the detailed costs of a study it ran for a tuberculosis treatment regimen and maintained this is the first time that expenses incurred for an individual clinical trial had been publicized.
Moreover, the charity argued that its decision should help undercut a long-standing contention by drug companies that high prices for their medicines can be justified by research costs, even though these expenses are never disclosed publicly.
The trial in question, which examined combinations of medicines in more than 500 patients in three countries, was designed to identify the best approach to tackling multi-drug resistance to tuberculosis. The results were published two years ago in the New England Journal of Medicine and the total cost for the undertaking was $36 million, according to Doctors Without Borders.
