Researcher kept quiet about cash
Cancer doctor didn’t disclose ties to health, drug firms
One of the world’s top breast cancer doctors failed to disclose millions of dollars in payments from drug and health care companies in recent years, omitting his financial ties from dozens of research articles in prestigious publications like The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet.
The researcher, Dr.
Jose Baselga, is the chief medical officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He has held board memberships or advisory roles with Roche and Bristol-myers Squibb, among others, and has had a stake in startups testing cancer therapies, and played a key role in the development of breakthrough drugs that have revolutionized treatments for breast cancer.
According to an analysis by The New York Times and Propublica, Baselga did not follow financial disclosure rules set by the American Association for Cancer Research when he was president of the group. He also left out payments he received from companies connected to cancer research in his articles published in the group’s journal, Cancer Discovery. At the same time, he has been one of the journal’s two editors-in-chief.
At a conference this year and before analysts in 2017, he put a positive spin on the results of two Roche-sponsored clinical trials that many others considered disappointments, without disclosing his relationship to the company. Since 2014, he has received more than $3 million from Roche in consulting fees and for his stake in a company it acquired.
In an interview, Baselga said the disclosure lapses were unintentional.
“I acknowledge that there have been inconsistencies, but that’s what it is,” he said. “It’s not that
I do not appreciate the importance.”
Baselga’s extensive corporate relationships — and his frequent failure to disclose them — illustrate how permeable the boundaries remain between academic research and industry, and how weakly reporting requirements are enforced by the medical journals and professional societies charged with policing them.
The penalties for such ethical lapses are not severe. The cancer research group, the AACR, warns authors who fill out disclosure forms for its journals that they face a three-year ban on publishing if they are found to have financial relationships they did not disclose. But the group said no author had ever been barred.
Officials at the AACR, the American Society of Clinical Oncology and The New England Journal of Medicine said they were looking into Baselga’s omissions after inquiries from The New York Times and Propublica. The Lancet declined to say whether it would look into the matter.
Christine Hickey, a spokeswoman for Memorial Sloan Kettering, said Baselga had properly informed the hospital of his outside industry work and that it was Baselga’s responsibility to disclose such relationships to entities like medical journals.
In a statement several days later, he said he would correct his conflict-ofinterest reporting for 17 articles, including in The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet and Cancer Discovery. He said that he did not believe disclosure was required for dozens of other articles detailing early stages of research.
Baselga, 59, supervises clinical operations at Memorial Sloan Kettering. He was paid more than $1.5 million in compensation in 2016, according to the hospital’s latest available tax disclosures.
In addition to sitting on the board of Bristol-myers Squibb, he is a director of Varian Medical Systems, which sells radiation equipment and for whom Memorial Sloan Kettering is a client.
The hospital and Baselga said steps had been taken to prevent him from having a say in any business between the cancer center and the companies on whose boards he sits. From August 2013 through 2017, Baselga received nearly $3.5 million from nine companies, according to the federal Open Payments database, which compiles disclosures filed by drug and device companies.