Drug Firms Asked to Divulge NIH Payments
Two leading Democrats in the House of Representatives called on 10 major drug companies Thursday to reveal how much they had paid in consulting fees and stock options to scientists at the National Institutes of Health.
The request comes as congressional investigators have been frustrated in their recent attempts to pry the information from NIH officials.
Rep. Henry A. Waxman of Los Angeles, the senior Democrat on the Government Reform Committee, and Rep. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a ranking Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, asked the drug company executives to respond by March 11, “in order to facilitate our investigation of these potential conflicts of interest.”
In their letter to the executives, Waxman and Brown wrote that their request was prompted by a Dec. 7 report in the Los Angeles Times, revealing hundreds of payments of consulting fees and stock options to employees of the NIH. The articles also reported that more than 94% of the top-paid NIH employees were not required to publicly disclose income from drug companies or other outside employers.
On Wednesday, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Investigations subcommittee issued a letter complaining that NIH leaders had not complied with the panel’s Dec. 8 request for details about the amounts of money paid by companies to agency employees. Last month, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, warned NIH Director Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni that the company payments to agency employees posed “major problems.”
Zerhouni declined to comment Thursday on the Waxman-Brown letter.
Spokesmen for several of the companies said Thursday that their firms would begin reviewing the congressmen’s request. The companies addressed in the letter were Abbot Laboratories, Allergan Inc., Amgen Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly and Company, Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co. Inc., Pfizer Inc., Schering-Plough and Wyeth.
In an interview, Waxman said: “It’s disturbing that there’s virtually no disclosure of these consulting agreements by people at NIH with pharmaceutical company contracts. We need to know whether decisions have been made that are not justified by the science.”
“It’s the public’s business,” he added. “The loosened restrictions at NIH have benefited the drug industry in a number of ways. There is the potential to set an agenda on research and grant making, all to benefit large drug manufacturers.”
The letter requests details about financial arrangements with NIH employees that existed from 1995 to the present, specifically:
* “A complete listing of all stock options, consulting fees, or other financial arrangements” with NIH scientists, identified by name.
* “A listing of all cooperative research agreements, grants and contracts ... including information on the value and nature of these arrangements as well as the NIH officials responsible for awarding them.”
* “Any information on patents awarded to your company for products that were developed with assistance from NIH scientists [and] detailed information on the nature and value of the contribution of the NIH scientists to the patent.”
* “A description of company policies that are in effect to ensure that NIH scientists who have financial arrangements with [the company] are able to avoid conflicts of interest.”
