Trial Registration Report Card

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Abstract
One measure of medical progress is new treatments. The discovery of a novel therapy takes time and money, but more important, it requires the mutual effort of groups that, while they share the common goal of improved treatment, often have fundamentally competing interests. These interests intersect at the clinical trial. Patients who are looking for more effective and safer treatment agree to take part in a clinical trial in the hope that they will benefit from such treatment or that others with similar conditions will benefit later. The company developing the new therapy shares the hope that the trial will be successful, because it wants to market the tested therapy exclusively and profitably for as long as possible before its competitors can launch a similar therapy into the marketplace. These goals, though overlapping, are inevitably in conflict and will generate tension. Such tension has been thrown into sharp relief over the past 15 months by the push for clinical trial registration.