Clinical trials that are actually marketing ploys targeting doctors: How seeding trials put profit over patients

MedicalXpress | ماي 06, 2026

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.