Seattle Paper on Leaks of Drug Trial Secrets; NIH Report Issued on Conflicts of Interest

The Seattle Times on Sunday published an investigative report by Luke Timmerman and David Heath that discloses that Wall Street insiders are learning about late-stage drug trials, and the progress of drug candidates, before results become available publicly. The investigative report points to hedge funds as the drivers in this search for information and “matchmaking firms,” such as Gerson Lehrman Group, as possible facilitators in a dialogue that apparently exposes confidential information.

Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, pens a valentine to the Pacific Northwest in a guest column in the Sunday Seattle Times advocating for a Congressional bill prohibiting discrimination in health insurance and employment on the basis of genetic information. The bill has cleared the Senate is awaiting House consideration. Collins said it is backed by the Bush administration.

Collins appears busier than some erstwhile new biology economy columnists, recently publishing in the Boston Globe, and covered here, a warning of a lack of oversight in the emerging personalized medicine market.

Kevin Freking of The Associated Press last week covered an NIH report issued Friday investigating apparent outside activities by its top employees in the period between 2001 to 2003. According to the AP, the report said that 22 percent of outside activities were not disclosed, and 28 percent were requests were approved – after the scheduled start dates of the engagements. The report covered the work of the top 174 senior level workers at the NIH.

The NIH in February began to restrict the ability of NIH scientists to work and invest outside the agency.

The report on the NIH, first covered by the Los Angeles Times on Thursday, was to be released to the public on Friday by the office of the Inspector General of HHS, but is not readily apparent on any of the agencies' websites.

On Sunday Marie McCullough of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote an article that looks at OvaCheck, a potential product for diagnosing ovarian cancer based on a blood test and proteomics and bioinformatics techniques.

The article traces the creation of Correlogic Systems of Bethesda, Md., by Peter Levine and Ben Hitt to commercialize a pattern recognition process underlying this diagnostic approach in an R&D cooperation with scientists Emanuel Petricoin, then of the FDA, and Lance Liotta of the National Cancer Institute.

The article, distributed online and available here, focuses on Correlogic and OvaCheck but examines the hurdles that proteomics – and by extension, other genomics-based techniques – have failed to meet thus far.

But, most interesting in the article, is the coverage of the interactions between the company and the tech-transfer deals involving Petricoin and Liotta, who left the government this spring to create a proteomics program at George Mason University.

Levine testified before Congress about the relationship between Correlogic and the agencies last June. The article did not say if the reporter attempted to contact either Petricoin or Liotta for comment.