Real-World Drug Data Could Be Cherry-Picked: FDA Official

Drug decisions based on data from real-life experiences have raised concerns about scientists cherry picking from different databases to generate the results they want, an FDA deputy director said.

“My worry is that in observational data, someone may have looked around and tried to pick the things that worked out,” said Robert Temple, who’s the deputy center director for clinical science in the Food and Drug Administration’s drug center.

Observational studies gather information from data that has already been collected, or from observations and measurement of changes in patients’ health status and responses to interventions outside clinical trials.

The ...