NIH Suspends Emory Grant Amid Questions Over Pharma Payments

October 15, 2008

Wall Street Journal Blogs - New York,NY*

Posted by Goldstein

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The NIH is putting a hold on a five-year, $9.3 million grant to

Emory, after a senator raised questions about drug industry payments

to the chair of the med school's psychiatry department. The Atlanta

Journal-Constitution has the story.

An investigation by Sen. Chuck Grassley revealed that

Nemeroff had told Emory he would limit consulting payments from

GlaxoKline to less than $10,000 per year, but went on to be

paid $70,000 in Glaxo speaking fees the following year. Overall,

Nemeroff failed to report some $500,000 in payments, Grassley said.

Now, the NIH is halting payments on the last three years of the five-

year grant " pending resolution of outstanding issues relating to

conflict of interest procedures, " a university official told the

Journal-Constitution. Nemeroff is no longer listed as the principal

investigator on the grant, which funded an study into what factors

make common treatments for depression more likely to succeed.

Grassley's been looking into undisclosed payments to psychiatrists

around the country at high-profile institutions such as Harvard and

Stanford. The investigations come as Grassley pushes to pass a law

that would require drug makers to publicly report their payments to

doctors.

The senator has also pressed NIH to take the kind of disciplinary

action it did with Emory. In a recent interview with the science

journal Nature Medicine, Grassley said:

NIH has a lot of power. They've got a lot of muscle. And I want the

director of NIH to use that muscle to make sure universities are

doing what they're required to do. That, they've been very lax in. I

think that the NIH director ought to be as aggressive as he can. […]

[H]e's got a heck of a lot of authority. All he'd have to do is

withhold one grant or bring back money from a grant if somebody's

not doing their job. The message would get out pretty fast.

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