Suspicions over physician payments means Emory University School of Medicine will not be touching its $9.3 million NIH grant for a while.
Senator Chuck Grassley said that faculty in the medical school's psychiatry department agreed to keep consulting payments from GlaxoSmithKline to less than $10,000 each year, but failed to do so. In fact, Charles Nemeroff received $70,000 from GSK, bringing the total in payments to upwards of a half million dollars, which Nemeroff failed to report.
The grant has three years remaining, but NIH will keep it on hold until the university resolves its conflicts of interest and ensures that it's researcher physicians report payments from drug companies accurately.
It will be interesting to see which universities, researchers and drug companies Grassley picks for his next examples.
- see the Wall Street Journal blog entry