健康英语新闻:Medtronic funds Yale safety study

BEIJING, August 4 (Xinhuanet) -- Medtronic Inc. is giving Yale University a 2.5 million U.S. dollar grant to review the safety and effectiveness of its controversial spine treatment called Infuse Bone Graft, according to The Wall Street Journals Thursday.

Under terms of the pact, the company will release to Yale and eventually the public what participants described as an uNPRecedented amount of clinical trial and other data.

The university will select two research teams from other organizations to perform separate analyses of the data.

The announcement comes in the wake of a paper in June in the Spine Journal. The paper revealed that several clinical studies of Infuse, conducted by surgeons with strong economic ties to Medtronic, failed to report serious complications that arose in the trials.

The critical paper also found that many of the studies were designed in ways in favor of Infuse over a treatment given to a control group.

Medtronic disputes some of the findings and is conducting an internal investigation of the matter.

Infuse accounts for about 700 million dollars in annual sales for Medtronic. The product is under investigation by the Senate Finance Committee over the role payments to physicians who may have played how studies were reported.