The Lancet profiles Lisa Bero’s “path of most resistance”

Friday, May 18, 2012

Lisa Bero, PhD

Health policy expert Lisa Bero, PhD, is hailed in the latest issue of The Lancet for tackling hot-button subjects such as financial biases in drug research.

The profile titled “taking the path of most resistance,” is both online and in the respected global medical journal’s May 19, 2012 print issue. It describes how, after earning her doctorate in pharmacology, Bero chose to pursue the cause of evidence-based medicine and research bias in the face of detractors and even threats.

Bero is a faculty member and vice chair for research in the UCSF School of Pharmacy’s Department of Clinical Pharmacy. She is also a “real pioneer in terms of studying the things that influence science outside the ‘science’ itself, and particularly the role of industry in shaping it,” as colleague Ruth Malone, RN, PhD, FAAN, chair of the UCSF School of Nursing’s Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, told the journal.

As examples of her empirically driven work, the article cites recently published research ranging from analyzing the effectiveness of initiatives aimed at reducing smoking by changing public attitudes toward the tobacco industry to re-analyzing drug effectiveness findings by including previously unpublished data submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The goal of her work, as Bero tells The Lancet, “is to design effective ways to facilitate the translation of the best available research into policy.”

—David Jacobson

Image credit: Cindy Chew

More:

Lisa Bero: taking the path of most resistance

Related:

Study finds including unpublished FDA data alters drug effectiveness outcomes - UCSF School of Pharmacy

Tobacco industry denormalisation as a tobacco control intervention: a review - Tobacco Control