A review of top officials at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center found that there were repeated violations on financial conflicts of interest. The review was conducted by law firm Debevoise & Plimpton and jointly reported by The New York Times and ProPublica.
A review of top officials at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center found that there were repeated violations of financial conflicts of interest. The review was conducted by law firm Debevoise & Plimpton and jointly reported by The New York Times and ProPublica.
The overall issue is the institution’s leadership’s connections to drug and healthcare companies. The review, ProPublica writes, “concluded that officials frequently violated or skirted their own policies; that hospital leaders’ ties to companies were likely considered on an ad hoc basis rather than through rigorous vetting; and that researchers were often unaware that some senior executives had financial stakes in the outcomes of their studies.”
Yesterday, MSK announced a significant and extensive restructuring of its policies governing employees’ relationships and financial arrangements with outcomes companies. This also includes physicians’ public disclosures of corporations and placing limitations on outside work.
The overhaul states, in part, “MSK’s mission and obligations to its patients, research participants, staff members, students, trainees, and larger community must be the primary driver for institutional decisions about interactions with industry. This principle applies to MSK as an institution and to each member of the MSK staff. Potential financial benefits must not influence judgment or decision-making by MSK or MSK staff.”
The original review was stimulated by The New York Times and ProPublica coverage on the topic last year. In September, they reported that MSK’s chief medical officer, Jose Baselga, stepped down after he failed to disclose millions of dollars in payments from healthcare companies in dozens of research articles. At the time, officials with the hospital indicated it had “robust programs” in place to manage employees’ outside relationships.
Baselga received almost $3.5 million in payments from drug, medical equipment and diagnostic companies from August 2013 through 2018. The largest was from Genentech, for his ownership interest it Seragon Pharmaceuticals, which Genentech acquired in 2014. That payment was $3 million. Those were listed in Open Payments, a federal database that tracks payments made to doctors from healthcare companies.
But some payments don’t make it into that database, particularly if they don’t have FDA-approved drugs. Infinity Pharmaceuticals, for example, a biotech startup with no approved drug, paid Baselga almost $250,000 in cash and stock options for serving on its board of directors from 2015 to 2017.
In January of this year, MSK barred its top leadership from serving on the corporate boards of drug and healthcare companies. In October 2018, MSK’s chief executive officer, Craig B. Thompson, resigned from the board of Merck. They had paid him $300,000 in 2017 for his service. He also resigned from the board of contract research organization Charles River Laboratories.
Other cases revealed officials had lucrative relationships with for-profit companies, such as Paige.AI that was founded by a member of MSK’s executive board, the chairman of its pathology department and head of one of its research laboratories. The hospital made a deal with Paige.AI to license 25 million patient tissue slide images. Another example was a hospital vice president receiving an almost $1.4 million stake in a newly public company for representing MSK on its board of directors.
The review by Debevoise & Plimpton was part of a process conducted by MSK, who hired outside companies to look into these relationships and other ethical accusations. ProPublica notes that “the spotlight on the deals at Memorial Sloan Kettering also swayed other leading cancer centers, like Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, to reconsider their policies.”
Debevoise & Plimpton’s co-chairman of its commercial litigation group, Mark P. Goodman, told physicians during the review that it had found “a number of instances of serious noncompliance with MSK’s conflict-of-interest policies.”
The review involved interviewing 36 current and former staffers and board members and evaluating 25,000 documents. They did not conclude that these actions had hurt patients or compromised research. ProPublica writes, “In an email, Goodman disputed the characterization of the findings as violations of rules and said the report did not conclude that top officials acted in a concerted way. In his presentation, he referred instead to ‘noncompliance’ with hospital policies and to instances where executives appeared not to have followed existing policies.”
That may be so, but it has caused MSK and many other institutions to take a closer look at their conflict-of-interest policies and the behavior of his executives.
