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JimmyCrackCorn writes of an investigation published in The Milbank Quaterly.

From the article:

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Safety and Innovation Act has recently relaxed conflict-of-interest rules for FDA advisory committee members, but concerns remain about the influence of members’ financial relationships on the FDA’s drug approval process. Using a large newly available data set, this study carefully examined the relationship between the financial interests of FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) advisory committee members and whether members voted in a way favorable to these interests.

[...] There appears to be a pro-sponsor voting bias among advisory committee members who have exclusive financial relationships with the sponsoring firm but not among members who have nonexclusive financial relation- ships (ie, those with ties to both the sponsor and its competitors). These findings point to important heterogeneities in financial ties and suggest that policymakers will need to be nuanced in their management of financial relationships of FDA advisory committee members.