Senators Chuck Grassley and Herb Kohl today weighed in on transparency at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), urging the federal agency to take steps to increase transparency of federally funded biomedical research.
They are responding to the fact that NIH is seeking public comment as it considers changes to its disclosure policy, and the senators made specific recommendations related to both individual researchers and academic institutions who receive NIH grants.
According to Senators Grassley and Kohl “In January 2008, the HHS OIG released a report which found that NIH provided almost no oversight of its extramural funds” “With almost $24 billion in extramural funds distributed by NIH each year, and in light of the additional $10 billion provided by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act to fund research grants, it is imperative that NIH properly fulfills its mission to advance the public’s welfare and makes responsible use of the funding provided.”
The senators suggested that researchers be required to report their outside income to the nearest $1000, and that universities be required to complete a plan to manage the researcher’s potential conflicts of interest. Finally, they maintained that both the disclosures and the plan be available to the public via the NIH website.
In February, Grassley and Kohl filed an amendment to the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) which would have placed new requirements on institutions receiving NIH grants. The amendment was not included in the final bill.
For the past two years, Grassley and Kohl have collaborated to push for increased transparency in financial relationships between physicians and the drug, device and biologic industries. As part of that effort, they have championed the Physician Payments Sunshine Act (S. 301) to require these industries to publicly report payments and gifts to doctors. Recently, identical provisions to those in S.301 were included in the health care reform discussion documents released by the Senate Finance Committee. Similar provisions were included in the House draft bill as well.
This is a reasonable proposal, and NIH should consider it thoughtfully.
The NIH does however, needs to be careful and not lose sight of the goal for the NIH which is to fund the basic science which in turn becomes useful medications and procedures. It is important not to be completely focused on potential harm (conflict of interest) and lose out on the use of researchers who are developing needed medications. The next step to this could be to ban all physicians with any ties to industry.
All proposals should be though out in light of time to administer and the cost to implement the program versus the benefits that may be gained by implementing them.