January 19, 2008

NIH Faulted for Lax Oversight of Financial Conflicts

The National Institutes of Health has failed to adequately oversee hundreds of financial conflicts of interest among university biomedical researchers, partly because the reports universities have sent the agency about the conflicts have lacked any details, according to a new audit.

The NIH rarely asks universities to provide missing details about the nature of the conflicts and how they were resolved, information that the agency needs to determine whether universities acted properly, said the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services. The agency “should take a more active role” and obtain and evaluate that information more often, the inspector general said in the audit, released Thursday. (The department is the NIH’s parent agency.)

The NIH disagreed in a response. The existing system for reporting conflicts, which largely relies on universities to police themselves, provides “an appropriate framework for the effective management” of them, the agency said. NIH officials asserted, and the audit report agreed, that the agency was following the letter of existing regulations, which require reporting only of the conflicts’ existence, without details.

But if universities’ reports contain no useful information, their submission is a pointless, bureaucratic exercise, said Jeffrey P. Kahn, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. What’s more, the NIH “has no evidence to support their assertion that things are working fine,” he said.

Financial conflicts arise, for example, when a researcher running a clinical study receives stock or consulting fees from a corporation financing the trial. Experts say this can bias findings and jeopardize human subjects.

Bioethicists suggested that the NIH is itself conflicted about how to handle financial conflicts of interest. The NIH is the largest source of money for university research and has faced pressure from the scientists it supports not to raise regulatory roadblocks to their work.

The agency has also faced countervailing pressure recently from Congress, mostly to police large financial conflicts among the NIH’s own, “intramural” staff scientists. In response, the agency tightened rules for employees in 2005. Lawmakers have also periodically asked the NIH about conflicts among the academic researchers it finances but have yet to hold hearings or raise the heat.

See The Chronicle’s Daily Report on Monday for more on this story. —Jeffrey Brainard

Comments

1. Its not just NIH. The CDC has also been dropping the ball with regard to our health. For example, there is currently a GAO investigation going on of a huge, apparently CDC-sanctioned coverup of mold illness. This is the same situation that the Wall Street Journal wrote about last January 9. Also, the ACOEM’s involvement in that situation is very disturbing, given that they represent a source of (clearly tainted) information to many academic employers. Because of this whitewash, thousands of people who have been made ill by badly maintained water damaged buildings have been wrongly denied medical care for what clearly is an epidemic. They also have also often been unable to find legal representation. Researchers studying mold illness and related subjects like the causes and ways of addressing building related illness have been defunded or are unable to get funding .

   — Adrian    Jan 20, 05:06 PM    #

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