Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Orders Staff to 'Do a Better Job' of Disclosing Industry Ties

 

The move comes after ProPublica and The New York Times reported that one of its top executives failed to report payments from drug and health care companies in dozens of medical journal articles.

by Katie Thomas, The New York Times, and Charles Ornstein, ProPublica

This article was produced in partnership with The New York Times.

The chief executive of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center sent an email to all staff members on Sunday saying that the institution and its faculty “need to do a better job” of disclosing their relationships with the drug and health care industries.

“The matter of disclosure is serious,” wrote the executive, Dr. Craig B. Thompson, along with Kathryn Martin, the chief operating officer.

The email, which was labeled an “important message,” referred directly to an article published this weekend by ProPublica and The New York Times about the failure of Dr. José Baselga, the cancer center’s chief medical officer, to disclose his extensive industry relationships in dozens of research articles since 2013.

The Times and ProPublica found that Baselga had received millions of dollars in consulting fees and in ownership interests in health care companies, but had often failed to disclose those ties in appearances at scientific conferences and in journal articles. His reporting failures included articles in prestigious publications like the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet as well as in Cancer Discovery, a journal for which he serves as one of two editors in chief.

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Source: ProPublica