Huffington Post's Paul Raeburn on CPRIT

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-raeburn/did-texas-cancer-research_b_2006879.html

Did Texas Cancer Research Institute Meddle With Peer Review?

Paul Raeburn

The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, created with $3 billion of state taxpayer money, is now facing charges that it meddled with peer review to award contracts to preferred candidates. Its chief scientific officer, Alfred G. Gilman, a Nobel laureate, resigned in protest in May, and seven other scientists followed him out the door last week, including Philip A. Sharp of MIT, another Nobel laureate. 

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I can't think of a better example than this one of how a potential conflict of interest can undermine an institution," Paul Root Wolpe, a bioethicist at Emory University, tells Baker. Some of those who resigned said the institute was guilty of "hucksterism" and having "dishonored" the peer review system, Baker reports. 

Gilman's resignation, she writes, came after the institute awarded a $20-million grant to Lynda Chin at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where her husband, Ronald DePinho, is president. DePinho and M.D. Anderson were recently responsible for what I called a month ago one of the most hyped cancer stories I've seen in a long time--a "moon shots" program to cure cancer in five years. The program was based on not on a research breakthrough, but on a press release that CNN's Sanjay Gupta swallowed whole. 

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On Oct. 18, Berger wrote on his blog, SciGuy, that "most of the scientists from outside Texas who were hired to review scientific proposals also resigned during the last two weeks." In an email inadvertently sent to a wider audience than he intended, the chairman of the institute's politically appointed oversight committee wrote, "Better to get them all out of the way now."

M.D. Anderson is one of the nation's leading cancer-research institutes, and it's odd that the scandal over this grant should occur at roughly the same time that the institute was guilty of wildly overpromising a cure for cancer. Berger and Ackerman led their story with, "Lynda Chin is used to getting what she wants."