Women and babies are dying from inertia: a collaborative framework for obstetrical drug development is urgently needed.

Obstetrical complications, often referred to as the "great obstetrical syndromes," are among the most common global causes of mortality and morbidity in young women and their infants. However, treatments for these syndromes are underdeveloped compared with other fields of medicine and are urgently needed. This current paucity of treatments for obstetrical complications is a reflection of the challenges of drug development in pregnancy.

Coordination and planning of clinical research on a national and global level.

In reproductive medicine, the needs and desires of infertility patients drive future research, with the most important outcome being live birth of a baby. Large, multicenter, randomized clinical trials are considered the best research tool to evaluate the effectiveness of medical interventions, but they can often take a long time to find definitive answers. Advances in individual participant data (IPD) and network meta-analysis have enabled research questions to be answered more quickly, but better planning could streamline this process further.

Peer review comments on drug trials submitted to medical journals differ depending on sponsorship, results and acceptance: a retrospective cohort study.

Objective: During peer review, submitted manuscripts are scrutinised by independent experts to assist journal editors in their decision-making and to help improve the quality of articles. In this retrospective cohort study, peer review comments for drug trials submitted to medical journals were analysed to investigate whether there is a relation between the content of these comments and sponsorship, direction of results and decision about acceptance.

Design/setting: Descriptive content analysis of reviewer comments made on manuscripts on drug trials submitted to eight medical journals (January 2010-April 2012).

Differences between information in registries and articles did not influence publication acceptance.

Objectives: To assess whether journals are more likely to reject manuscripts with differences between information in registries and articles. We compared differences by sponsorship and assessed whether selective reporting favored publication of significant outcomes.

Study Design And Setting: Drug trials submitted to eight journals (January 2010-April 2012) were included.

Shortcomings of protocols of drug trials in relation to sponsorship as identified by Research Ethics Committees: analysis of comments raised during ethical review.

Background: Submission of study protocols to research ethics committees (RECs) constitutes one of the earliest stages at which planned trials are documented in detail. Previous studies have investigated the amendments requested from researchers by RECs, but the type of issues raised during REC review have not been compared by sponsor type. The objective of this study was to identify recurring shortcomings in protocols of drug trials based on REC comments and to assess whether these were more common among industry-sponsored or non-industry trials.