The New York Times reports this morning that the tobacco giant Liggett & Myers contributed $3.6 million to a controversial screening study that suggested using routine CT scans to detect lung cancer early could substantially reduce lung cancer deaths in the U.S. The Cancer Letter recently revealed that when the study first appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2006, the study authors, Claudia Henschke and David Yankelevitz of Weill-Cornell Medical College in New York, failed to disclose they had licensed scan-reading patents to General Electric, which would earn them a bundle if millions of smokers began getting annual CT scans. Now, it turns out that the study was also supported by a non-profit called the Foundation for Lung Cancer: Early Detection, Prevention and Treatment, whose board includes Henschke and top officials at Weill-Cornell Medical School. The Vector Group, which is the corporate parent of Liggett & Myers, announced in 2000 that it was giving several million dollars to the foundation.

“You have to ask yourself the question, ‘Why did the tobacco company want to support her research?’ ” Jerome Kassirer, author of "On The Take" told the Times. “They want to show that lung cancer is not so bad as everybody thinks because screening can save people; and that’s outrageous.”

Near the end of the story, Times reporter Gardiner Harris interviewed Murray Kopelow, chief executive of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), who revealed that numerous doctors and institutions are setting up foundations to accept money from companies without having to disclose its source.

Physicians who read the original article in NEJM could obtain continuing medical education (CME) credit by answering a few questions online. The ACCME accredits CME providers like NEJM. ACCME rules state that all presenters must disclose financial conflicts of interest during a CME activity. It can revoke accreditation for failing to follow the rules. The NEJM, in a written response to the Cancer Letter and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which filed an official complaint with ACCME, is claiming that Henschke's and Yankelevitz' patents on how to read CT scans to detect lung cancer were not relevant to the study that appeared in the journal in 2006. The Journal of the American Medical Association, in a corrected conflict-of-interest disclosure on another Henschke article posted earlier this week on the JAMA website, recognized that the patent was relevant.

I wonder if the NEJM editors will now say the same thing about the non-disclosure disclosure in the study that showed it had been supported by the Foundation for Lung Cancer: Early Detection, Prevention and Treatment, but gave no indication as to who stood behind that big tobacco front group.