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This article was produced in partnership with The New York Times.
On Sunday, Memorial Sloan CEO Kettering Cancer Center sent an email to all staff members telling them that the institution and its faculty "needed to better communicate their relationships with the drug and health care industries.
"The disclosure issue is serious," wrote the executive, Dr. Craig B. Thompson, as well as Kathryn Martin, chief operating officer.
The e-mail, referred to as an "important message", directly referred to an article published this weekend by ProPublica and the New York Times about the inability of Dr. José Baselga, medical director of the cancer center, to dozens of Research articles since 2013.
The Times and ProPublica found that Baselga had received millions of dollars in consulting fees and equity investments in healthcare companies, but had often failed to disclose these links at scientific conferences and journal articles. His reporting failures included articles in prestigious publications such as the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet, as well as in Cancer Discovery, a journal of which he is one of two editors.
Baselga acknowledged that it had often failed to disclose links with the sector and that it was planning to correct the file in 17 recent articles. But he denied that he should have divulged his links in dozens of other cases, claiming that the articles contained preliminary research for which the financial implications for companies were limited.
Several institutions, including the New England Journal of Medicine and the American Society of Clinical Oncology, said they were reviewing its revelations. The American Association for Cancer Research said it had also begun a review of Baselga's reporting practices. Baselga appears to have violated the disclosure rules while he was chairman of this organization in 2015 and 2016. The AACR also publishes Cancer Discovery.
In e-mail, Thompson and Martin described the guidelines for declaring relations with the sector as "nebulous," adding that "we must work with newspaper publishers and professional societies to standardize the reporting process." the cancer group, which pushed for more standardized disclosure.
Ten years ago, a series of scandals related to hidden payments by pharmaceutical companies to leading physicians prompted medical journals and professional associations to tighten their reporting requirements. But as the arguments of Baselga and others demonstrate, much remains to be done in the honor system. Medical journals said they did not systematically check the authors' disclosures.
In comments to the Times and ProPublica, the New England Journal of Medicine acknowledged that the problem of missed disclosures is "widespread" and said it is putting in place a better system for tracking author disclosures. Two of the articles that Baselga said it wants to correct have been published in this review.
Baselga has served since March on the Board of Directors of Bristol-Myers Squibb, a leading manufacturer of cancer drugs, and since 2017 on the board of directors of Varian Medical Systems, which sells radiation therapy equipment to centers. anti-cancer drugs, including Memorial Sloan Kettering.
According to Open Payments, a federal database that tracks payments to healthcare companies, Baselga received nearly $ 3.5 million in payments from drug, medical device and diagnostic companies in August 2013 to 2017. Most of this amount, approximately $ 3 million, related to a payment from Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, for Baselga's stake in a company it had acquired, Seragon Pharmaceuticals, in 2014. .
But this amount does not include the many companies with which Baselga has links that do not report physician payments to the federal database because they are biotech start-ups without any products approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Baselga has refused to provide a count of the money it has received from these companies.
Memorial Sloan Kettering employs approximately 17,000 people and conducts hundreds of clinical trials.
In the email to staff, Thompson and Martin concluded by affirming the value of working with the health care sector.
"Collaboration with industry leaders, from start-ups to large companies, is needed to develop better treatments for patients," they said.
Christine Hickey, a spokeswoman for Memorial Sloan Kettering, said the cancer center had no other comments.
Katie Thomas covers the pharmaceutical industry for the New York Times.
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