Grassley Vows to Pressure NIH Over Grants

The ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee wants the National Institutes of Health to revoke grants to academic scientists who fail to report financial conflicts of interest to their institutions, the Iowa Senator tells The Chronicle of Higher Education.

His remarks come after targeting Harvard University, Stanford University and the University of Cincinnati, because some academics underreported their own financial interests in research projects supported by the NIH. Institutions are required by federal regulation to report the existence of those conflicts to the agency. Grassley is seeking info from 20 other institutions about financial conflicts among their scientists, including Brown University’s Martin Keller, and the American Psychiatric Association.

Since 1995, an NIH regulation has required scientists to report to their universities any “significant financial interests” they hold in research projects financed by the agency. Those are defined as income or equity interest of $10,000 from a company or 5-percent ownership of its stock. The universities, in turn, 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, the paper notes.

READ MORE @ PHARMALOT

Psychiatric Group Faces Scrutiny Over Drug Industry Ties

It seemed an ideal marriage, a scientific partnership that would attack mental illness from all sides. Psychiatrists would bring to the union their expertise and clinical experience, drug makers would provide their products and the money to run rigorous studies, and patients would get better medications, faster.

But now the profession itself is under attack in Congress, accused of allowing this relationship to become too cozy. After a series of stinging investigations of individual doctors’ arrangements with drug makers, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is demanding that the American Psychiatric Association, the field’s premier professional organization, give an accounting of its financing.

The association is the voice of establishment psychiatry, publishing the field’s major journals and its standard diagnostic manual.

“I have come to understand that money from the pharmaceutical industry can shape the practices of nonprofit organizations that purport to be independent in their viewpoints and actions,” Mr. Grassley said Thursday in a letter to the association.

READ MORE @ NY TIMES