Cancer charities attacked for lack of fund control: Research guidelines urged after Bristol Study errors

TWO of Britain's biggest charities, which between them spend about pounds 90m a year on cancer research, have been severely criticised for failing to control funds they allocate to some researchers.

An investigation by the Charity Commission also found that the Cancer Research Campaign and Imperial Cancer Research Fund had allowed scientific data to be published under their names 'without ensuring that it was soundly based'. The commission is urging new guidelines on good practice in funding of medical research by charities.

The findings of the 19- month inquiry, published yesterday only after pressure from the Independent, brings to a close one of the most embarrassing episodes in British medical research history. Publication also marks a victory for a group of breast cancer patients from the Bristol Cancer Help Centre, a centre for alternative therapy, who took part in a study funded by the ICRF and CRC. Their complaint to the commission prompted the inquiry.

The study, known as the Bristol Study, appeared in the Lancet in September 1990. It made headlines world-wide and dealt a devastating blow to the cause of alternative medicine, bringing the centre to the brink of ruin. The study concluded that women treated at Bristol were three times more likely to suffer spread of the disease, and twice as likely to die, as women treated with orthodox medicine.

However, the study was fundamentally flawed and within weeks the researchers admitted their errors. The lead researcher, Professor Tim McElwain of the Institute of Cancer Research, which oversaw the study, committed suicide, and eventually the project was abandoned in May 1991.

However, the study was never fully retracted nor did anyone accept responsibility for the catalogue of errors and mismanagement which had led to publication of results less than half-way through the agreed study period. Some of the women formed the Bristol Survey Support Group, lodging a formal complaint with the Charity Commission in April 1992. They were the first group of patients to challenge a scientific study in which they were subjects. In its statement yesterday the commission said that 'no one adequately supervised the Bristol Study to ensure the proper application of charitable funds.' They concluded that 'their (ICRF and CRC) procedures for the supervision of research and control of research results were not entirely satisfactory so that charities could not be certain that charity funds awarded to independent researchers were properly applied.'

Professor Nick Wright of the CRC said yesterday that the Bristol Study should be regarded as a 'very sad exception to the normal rule'. A spokeswoman for the Cancer Research Campaign said that the researchers made an 'honest scientific mistake' and it regretted the distress caused to patients at the Bristol Centre. Both charities say they have tightened up their procedures and will work closely with the Charity Commission to draw up new guidelines.

Heather Goodare, secretary of the Bristol Survey Support Group, said yesterday that the report was 'warmly welcomed' as a vindication of their work over three years. 'The interests of patients are not served by polarisation of the two sides of medicine, orthodox and complementary.'

Leading article, page 15