NEJM Confirms Tobacco Industry Funded Study

The New England Journal of Medicine in this morning's edition printed a correction from Drs. Claudia Henschke and David Yankelevitz of Weill-Cornell Medical School that admitted the tobacco giant Liggett & Myers funded their study claiming routine CT scans for smokers can cure 80 percent of lung cancer cases. The original article appeared in NEJM in October 2006 without that information.

In an accompanying editorial, the editors ask authors to reveal who funded their research (the industry funding in this case had been laundered through a non-profit beguilingly named the Foundation for Lung Cancer: Early Detection, Prevention and Treatment.

"As medical journal editors, we believe that it is important that the ultimate source of funding be made clear to the Journal's readers. Second, it is appropriate to ask whether a study on clinical outcomes in lung cancer should be directly underwritten in part by the tobacco industry. Given the enormous burden of smoking-related illness and the ongoing sale of cigarettes and other forms of tobacco, one might question the advisability of research entities accepting funding from tobacco companies except through the American Legacy Foundation, which distributes funds received through the Master Settlement Agreement with U.S. tobacco companies.

"We believe that it is important for our readers and the entire biomedical community to be aware of this situation. Our goal is that readers be fully informed about funding sources. It is the responsibility of authors to disclose fully and appropriately the sources of funding of their studies. We expect that authors will be particularly attentive to transparency in reporting if a funding entity has a vested interest in the outcome. The public's trust in biomedical research depends on it."

Unfortunately, the editors made no mention of another correction from the same article that was also printed in the NEJM this morning. The correction stated that the Henschke-Yankelevitz article should have disclosed their patent on a technique for reading films from CT lung scans, which is held by their university and generates royalties from General Electric.

A few weeks ago, the editors told the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the Cancer Letter that the patent wasn't "relevant" to the original research article and therefore needn't be disclosed. Are they now saying that a patent must be generating royalties before it becomes relevant? Isn't it possible that a scientist holding a patent might want to get something published in the literature that would make some company interested in licensing that patent? Isn't that a conflict of interest that should be disclosed? The editorial's conspicuous silence on this point is disturbing.