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 The New York Times and ProPublica 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 Dr. 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.

Source: New York Times September 09, 2018 20:00 UTC