The pharmaceutical industry has a history of working with higher education to foster research and innovation.
Since the beginning of this year, these partnerships have been under more scrutiny following a bill introduced by Sen. Chuck Grassley and Sen. Herb Kohl that mandates disclosure of payments from pharmaceutical companies to doctors, according to a statement.
Dr. Jeffrey Wang was investigated in 2009 after failure to disclose financial information in a timely manner, according to a statement. He was removed from his position as co-director of the UCLA Comprehensive Spine Center but remains a full-time faculty member, said Roxanne Moster, director of UCLA Health Sciences Media Relations.
To manage many of these conflict-of-interest issues, UCLA has the federally mandated Institutional Review Boards.
The board serves the function of making sure researchers and pharmaceutical companies adhere to a certain code of ethical conduct, said Sharon Friend, director of the Office of the Human Research Protection Program.
The board checks not only for potential financial interest of the faculty investigators, but also for that of their family members.
In addition, they serve to monitor consent forms for indemnification, or treatment compensation for injury, the language used to describe ownership of biological specimens, and descriptions of what happens if there’s a finding and who profits.
Typically, two kinds of partnerships occur between pharmaceutical companies and universities, said Steven Casper, director of the Masters in Biosciences Program at the Keck Graduate Institute.
In the first kind, a pharmaceutical company will sponsor very specific scientific research.
The other type of partnership occurs when companies sponsor clinical trials conducted by medical schools such as the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, he said.
Industry-sponsored research can further be divided into two categories. In certain cases, it deals with actual medical science, and in others, it may address the delivery side of a drug such as the efficiency of hospital systems, said Fred Hagigi, the director of Executive Education Programs and a professor of health services at UCLA.
Professors benefit from these relationships because they may have their research sponsored, said Leah Vriesman, assistant professor in the Department of Health Services.
She also said that in larger universities, the sponsorship can often offset salaries and help to pay for graduate students.
Faculty may have the further incentive of being able to find a better drug to cure a patient, said Kathryn Atchison, vice provost of Intellectual Property and Industry Relations.
“(Clinicians) have an urge that’s not just personal, but from their patients to make anything available to them possible,” she said.
But often, different types of issues of conflict arise.
Recently, there has been criticism regarding publications in peer review journals in which the faculty member does not disclose where funding came from, Vriesman said.
In addition, negative trials of drugs are often not published, which creates a bias, she said.
Hagigi said universities often try to negotiate terms in which professors can still maintain the academic freedom to publish regardless of the result.
There may also be concerns of the validity of industry-sponsored research or clinical trials if the person conducting the research has an affiliation with an outside company, Casper said.