NIH & Financial Conflicts Of Interest

[Hannah Bell]

// December 5th, 2008 // 11:24 am

For the past few months, the US Senate Finance Committee has been investigating various high-profile academic researchers for undisclosed conflicts of interest involving payments from pharma for speaking, research and consulting and simultaneously receiving NIH grants.

An NIH regulation requires researchers to report to their universities any “significant financial interests” they hold in research financed by the agency - defined as income or equity interest of $10,000 from a company or 5-percent ownership of its stock. The universities are required to tell the NIH whether they were able to manage or eliminate the conflicts in order to avoid bias in the research findings.

However, the NIH has been criticized by the Chuck Grassley, the committee’s ranking Republican, for failing to monitor conflicts. Earlier this year, in fact, Norka Ruiz Bravo, who until recently was the NIH deputy director for extramural research, maintained the agency couldn’t simply monitor such things. She was recently replaced amid assertions by outgoing NIH Elias Zerhouni that the agency would work harder (back story here, here and here).

http://www.pharmalot.com/page/4/