Category: Conflicts of Interest

Photograph of Purdue Pharma headquarters

The Role of Attorneys General in the Opioid Litigation

Daniel G. Aaron 3 Comments

By Daniel Aaron

People following the opioid lawsuits might have noticed some strange headlines as of late. Virtually every state’s attorney general (AG) is suing Purdue Pharmaceuticals, maker of the blockbuster drug OxyContin. Purdue filed for bankruptcy and is hoping to settle for “$10 billion.” However, the deal only includes $4.4 billion in cash, which is less than the Sackler family, owners of Purdue, transferred to personal accounts over the past decade. In other words, the amount of money the Sacklers made from the opioid epidemic is more than what they will pay more than forty states to help abate the crisis. Is anyone supporting this deal?

Yes, in fact, and this is where the plot thickens. With several exceptions, support for the deal falls along party lines: Republican AGs support the deal, and Democratic AGs oppose it. Why does a decision about settling with an opioid company appear to be political? What is the role of an attorney general? And are they supposed to defend public health?

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Is Data Sharing Caring Enough About Patient Privacy? Part II: Potential Impact on US Data Sharing Regulations

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

A recent US lawsuit highlights crucial challenges at the interface of data utility, patient privacy & data misuse

By Timo Minssen (CeBIL, UCPH), Sara Gerke & Carmel Shachar

Earlier, we discussed the new suit filed against Google, the University of Chicago (UC), and UChicago Medicine, focusing on the disclosure of patient data from UC to Google. This piece goes beyond the background to consider the potential impact of this lawsuit, in the U.S., as well as placing the lawsuit in the context of other trends in data privacy and security.

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Is Data Sharing Caring Enough About Patient Privacy? Part I: The Background

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Timo Minssen (CeBIL, UCPH), Sara Gerke & Carmel Shachar

A recent US lawsuit highlights crucial challenges at the interface of data utility, patient privacy & data misuse

The huge prospects of artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML), as well as the increasing trend toward public-private partnerships in biomedical innovation, stress the importance of an effective governance and regulation of data sharing in the health and life sciences. Cutting-edge biomedical research strongly demands high-quality data to ensure safe and effective health products. It is often argued that greater access to individual patient data collections stored in hospitals’ medical records systems may considerably advance medical science and improve patient care. However, as public and private actors attempt to gain access to such high-quality data to train their advanced algorithms, a number of sensitive ethical and legal aspects also need to be carefully considered. Besides giving rise to safety, antitrust, trade secrets, and intellectual property issues, such practices have resulted in serious concerns with regard to patient privacy, confidentiality, and the commitments made to patients via appropriate informed consent processes.

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José Baselga, MD, PhD

Memorial Sloan Kettering Stops Executives From Corporate Engagements: Is it Enough?

Mark Dennis Robinson 1 Comment

After a high profile set of scandals, the prominent cancer research hospital, New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering made an unprecedented move to limit their executives capacity to engage with private industry while employed with Sloan Kettering. Part of a larger set of reforms, Sloan Kettering now has policies that curb or limit serving on corporate boards while employed at Sloan or from accepting certain forms of compensation such as stock or equity. These reforms were bold statements from a preeminent academic medical center about the need to ensure that financial conflicts aren’t compromising patient care or the work of the institution.

Yet, are these laudable reforms enough? Read More

Social media concept: students sit at a table with social media notification bubbles floating above them.

Is Your Cellphone Destroying Your Morals? Devices, Distraction and the Impossible Ethics of Modern Life

Mark Dennis Robinson Leave a comment

It isn’t that texting and driving is dangerous per se. If we were perfectly capable of doing both flawlessly, this danger would instantly disappear. Yet, we know that the danger of texting and driving exists precisely because of the fragility of our attention. The consequences of distracted driving loom large: According to one source, “Text messaging creates a crash risk 23 times worse than driving while not distracted.”

The reasons for this lay in the recesses of a brain stunningly ill-suited to multitasking. Yet, what is useful about this example is that it highlights with searing severity the moral risks and costs of an increasingly distracted mind.

As multitasking now defines modern life, a hugely important question emerges: What will an increasingly distracted brain mean for ethics? Read More

DNA Donors Must Demand Stronger Privacy Protection

Mason Marks Leave a comment

By Mason Marks and Tiffany Li

An earlier version of this article was published in STAT.

The National Institutes of Health wants your DNA, and the DNA of one million other Americans, for an ambitious project called All of Us. Its goal — to “uncover paths toward delivering precision medicine” — is a good one. But until it can safeguard participants’ sensitive genetic information, you should decline the invitation to join unless you fully understand and accept the risks.

DNA databases like All of Us could provide valuable medical breakthroughs such as identifying new disease risk factors and potential drug targets. But these benefits could come with a high price: increased risk to individuals’ genetic data privacy, something that current U.S. laws do not adequately protect. Read More

Facebook Should ‘First Do No Harm’ When Collecting Health Data

Mason Marks Leave a comment

By Mason Marks

Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it was reported that Facebook planned to partner with medical organizations to obtain health records on thousands of users. The plans were put on hold when news of the scandal broke. But Facebook doesn’t need medical records to derive health data from its users. It can use artificial intelligence tools, such as machine learning, to infer sensitive medical information from its users’ behavior. I call this process mining for emergent medical data (EMD), and companies use it to sort consumers into health-related categories and serve them targeted advertisements. I will explain how mining for EMD is analogous to the process of medical diagnosis performed by physicians, and companies that engage in this activity may be practicing medicine without a license.

Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress about his company’s data collection practices. Many lawmakers that questioned him understood that Facebook collects consumer data and uses it to drive targeted ads. However, few Members of Congress seemed to understand that the value of data often lies not in the information itself, but in the inferences that can be drawn from it. There are numerous examples that illustrate how health information is inferred from the behavior of social media users: Last year Facebook announced its reliance on artificial intelligence to predict which users are at high risk for suicide; a leaked document revealed that Facebook identified teens feeling “anxious” and “hopeless;” and data scientists used Facebook messages and “likes” to predict whether users had substance use disorders. In 2016, researchers analyzed Instagram posts to predict whether users were depressed. In each of these examples, user data was analyzed to sort people into health-related categories.

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Webinar, 6/28: Procedural Aspects of Compulsory Licensing under TRIPS

Timo Minssen Leave a comment

Join us at yet another webinar with J. Wested at the University of Copenhagen. This time we will debate procedural issues in compulsory licensing with H. Grosse Ruse-Kahn (University of Cambridge) & M. Desai (Eli Lilly). Further information on our webinar series is available at here, here, and below:

Procedural Aspects of Compulsory Licensing under Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS)

Wednesday 28. June 2017
4-6 p.m (CEST)
Sign-up & questions: Jakob.blak.wested@jur.ku.dk

This webinar on “TRIPS and the life sciences” will approach the question of compulsory licensing by looking at the technical and procedural requirements applied by courts when evaluating a petition for a compulsory license.  

The balancing of the instrumental application of patent rights as a stimulator of innovation and the public interest in having access to these innovations form a controversial trajectory of discourse, which is as old as patent law. Compulsory licenses are one of the means that have been applied throughout the history of patent law, to condition this complex intersection of interests. The TRIPS agreement is no exception and art 31 contains the provision for member states to grant CL. In 2013, the Indian authorities granted a compulsory license to NATCO Pharmaceuticals for Bayers patented pharmaceutical product Carboxy Substituted Diphenyl Ureas, useful for the treatment of liver and kidney cancer. This decision raised several issues regarding the procedures and requirements to be met in order to grant a compulsory license. Furthermore, in January 2017 an amendment to TRIPS agreement entered into force allowing compulsory licensors to export their generic pharmaceuticals to least developed countries, further recalibrating the intersection of the monopoly power of the patent and public interest. Read More

Conflict of Interests Disclosures Come to PubMed

crobertson 1 Comment

By Christopher Robertson

Scholars and policymakers have long been concerned that the biomedical science literature — and thus the practice of medicine — is biased by the companies who fund research on their own products.  Prior research has shown that industry-funded studies tend to produce results favorable to their company sponsors.  One solution is disclosure of industry funding, so that physicians and other consumers of the biomedical literature can weigh scientific findings accordingly.

My prior work with Aaron Kesselheim, Susannah Rose, and others has found that adding such disclosures to biomedical abstracts could make a big difference — physicians understand them and will rely upon them.  Nonetheless, most journals bury the disclosures at the end of articles, which are often hidden behind paywalls and not nearly as salient as the methods and findings displayed in the abstract.  For the Institutional Corruption Lab of the Edmond J. Safra Center, I worked with a team of hackers to create a browser extension that proves the feasibility of adding those disclosures into PubMed, a Federal government database of the scientific literature.

Thankfully, that browser extension is becoming obsolete, as the National Library of Medicine (part of the NIH) has begun implementing such disclosures themselves, right in PubMed.   A search reveals that nearly 80,000 abstracts now have such tags.  While a lot in absolute terms, it is a small minority of the 17 million abstracts covered by PubMed.  Commentators have suggested that as much as 70% of the funding for clinical trials comes from industry, so we should expect millions of abstracts to have such disclosures.

Thus we are still a long way from comprehensive and effective disclosure.  There are two problems. Read More

Genetic counselors, genetic interpreters, and conflicting interests

Genetics in Medicine Leave a comment

By Katie Stoll, Amanda Mackison, Megan Allyse, and Marsha Michie

The booming genetic testing industry has created many new job opportunities for genetic counselors. Within commercial laboratories, genetic counselors work in sales and marketing, variant interpretation, as “medical science liaisons” to clinicians, and providing direct patient care. Although the communication skills and genetics expertise of the genetic counselor prepare them well for these roles, they also raise concerns about conflicts of interest (COI).

Why are genetic counselors leaving clinics and hospitals for industry jobs? Alongside greater job flexibility and taking on new challenges, a big reason is better pay. Hospitals and clinics have difficulty competing with the higher salaries at commercial labs because of continuing challenges in insurance reimbursement. Apart from limited preventive care covered under the Affordable Care Act, genetic counseling is inconsistently covered by private payers. Medicaid reimbursement for genetic counseling is state-dependent, and Medicare does not recognize genetic counselors as reimbursable health care providers at all.

Genetic counselors’ primary objective has historically been to help patients navigate difficult medical genetic information and decisions, supporting their autonomy.  But as laboratory employees, they must also navigate their employer’s financial interests, including increasing the uptake of genetic testing. In this changing landscape, can the profession of genetic counseling maintain the bioethical principles of beneficence, informed consent, and respect for autonomy that have been its foundation and ethos? Read More