Uncertainty swirls around e-cig research

smoking medications, e-cigs rival both tobacco and pharma. Tobacco firms have responded to that threat by buying up e-cig businesses, and are now funding research. Pharma firms keep their distance.

The products have opened a rift between researchers who see their goal as eliminating nicotine in all its forms, and others who believe it is more sensible to reduce the harm.

“You’ve got people who’ve taken a position and they’re looking at the evidence only in relation to the position they’ve got,” says David Sweanor, an e-cig enthusiast and University of Ottawa law professor.

There are more than 2,000 papers on e-cigarettes in the scholarly journals covered by the database Web of Science. Most in the highest-impact journals have been funded by public bodies. Only a few contain original research; methodological problems or potential bias are common. cessation is a small business, generating $2.4bn in sales in 2013, says Euromonitor. That is a fraction of the $206bn the industry generated in global consumer health products.

“We’ve decided we’re not going to play,” says Andrew Witty, CE of GlaxoSmithKline. “We’ve consciously had a think about it but we’re not….”

This leaves e-cigarette firms to fund their own research, giving rise to concerns over conflicts of interest.

In 2010 Italian firm Arbi Group, a distributor of e-cigarettes, sponsored a significant body of work by a team at Catania University in Sicily. The researchers conducted one of the two randomised trials included in the Cochrane Review and are working on nine of the 48 trials logged with the US National Institutes of Health.

The Catania randomised trial took 300 smokers who did not intend to quit and found that, with or without nicotine, e-cigs cut consumption of cigarettes and helped some to stop completely, without significant adverse effects.

“At the end of the day we were stuck accepting money from e-cigarette owners because there was no other way to carry out research,” says Catania professor Riccardo Polosa. He also received funding from pharma.

That, says Charlotta Pisinger, a Danish doctor who