The Story of CPRIT, Part 2: A Problematic Grant

The grant that upset Dr. Gilman so much that he chose to resign was an award of $22 million dollars for one year. The award had been presented to the Oversight Committeee and approved without going through any scientific review. It was a combination award to Rice and to an organization, IACS (Institute for Applied Cancer Science), associated with Lynda Chin, a scientist and wife of the president of M.D. Anderson, Ronald DePinho. Remarkably, the IACS portion of the award had not been reviewed by the provost of either Rice or M.D. Anderson, and after reaching CPRIT, it was rushed through the CPRIT approval process in a very short timeframe in March 2012, and not at all in the regular way of electronic submission and a review process mentioned in yesterday’s post.Apparently, this had been in the works for some time. CPRIT memos show discussion of this between Jerry Cobbs, the Chief Commercialization Officer, and the IACS people as early as January. And Charles Sherr, a member of the Scientific Review Council, recounted in a May email that he had run into DePinho in October at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.Over cocktails, I ran into Ron who immediately told me that he was in direct touch with ‘the higher-ups’ who run CPRIT and that the program and Al would soon be under pressure to change the current approach. . . . [I suggested] he might speak directly to Al. Well appreciating Ron’s malignant ambition . . . , I was not blind-sid...
Source: Health Care Renewal - Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Source Type: blogs