The journal Nature and genomeweb.com
today picked up the story from the California Stem Cell Report about
the conflict of interest case at the California stem cell agency involving renown scientist Lee Hood of
Seattle, Wash.

Source:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/uqpFc/~3/xBpF71FS1Ys/nature-reports-on-lee-hood-conflict-case.html

Jonathan Thomas, chairman of the California stem cell agency, said this morning that he and a team from the agency will begin a round of meetings this summer with patient advocate groups throughout the state.

He said the effort is aimed at keeping the groups up to speed on developments at CIRM. While Thomas did not mention it to the agency's governing board, it is also critical that the agency have strong support from patient advocate groups as it tries to develop new sources of funding, either public or private.

The agency will run out of cash for new grants in 2017 and hopes to have a plan for the future before the board later this year. Its initial assumptions include as much as $200 million in onetime public funding with more cash coming from the private sector.

Currently the agency is funded by state bonds at a cost of about $6 billion, including interest. It spends roughly $300 million a year on grants and loans for research.Source:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/uqpFc/~3/lra474LHezU/california-stem-cell-agency-to-court.html

Here is the full text of the statement
today by Kevin McCormack, senior director for public communications
at the California stem cell agency, in connection with the conflict
of interest issue involving Lee Hood, president of Institute for
Systems Biology of Seattle, Wash. See here for a story on the matter.

“Did (CIRM President Alan) Trounson
recruit Hood to serve on the grants working group?

“Does CIRM perform any sort of
serious examination of the statements of interests of its scientific
reviewers prior to specific review sessions. The conflict involving
Weissman and Hood was easily detected by a Google search. The first
two entries on the search term "lee hood irv weissman"
raise serious red flags. Additionally, I imagine it is more than
common knowledge among many in the scientific community that
these two scientists are longtime friends.”

“Alan helps recruit many reviewers,
including in this case Dr. Hood, but he is not involved in assigning
reviewers to individual applications. Furthermore he expects all
reviewers to declare whatever conflicts they have.  

“Yes, we do a serious examination of
statements of interest from all our reviewers. However, this conflict
was not identified by the reviewer either in the financial disclosure
statement or identified in the conflict of interest list. Normally we
do not check Google for all possible combinations of 15 GWG reviewers
times about 200 individuals listed in these applications. That would
be about 3000 independent Google searches to identify a possible
conflict. While this relationship may be known to some it certainly
was not known to the CIRM staff who checked the conflicts. If it had
been they would have raised it before the meeting.

“It's also important to point out
that Dr. Hood was a new member of this review panel and was not
familiar with our conflict of interest rules. This was clearly a case
of a new reviewer making an innocent error.

“Finally, CIRM’s rules are stricter
than state law, and this would not have been a conflict under
California conflict of interest law.”

Source:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/uqpFc/~3/1ndmVIt2OlQ/text-of-cirm-comments-on-lee-hood.html