From the most excellent WSJ Health Blog. There is this small matter of a very large amount of money going to a person investigating the possible use of a drug. Corcept is studying the drug mifepristone to treat psychotic depression; Schatzberg is listed as the principal investigator on an NIH-funded study of mifepristone. Can you guess what the research results were?
Chuck Grassley is at it again. The senator from Iowa is looking into a Stanford psychiatry professor’s multimillion-dollar stake in a drug company called Corcept Therapeutics.
Alan Schatzberg, who heads Stanford’s psych department, followed the university’s rules and reported having a stake of more than $100,000 in the company. According to Grassley, Schatzberg’s total stake in the company may be worth some $6 million.
“Obviously, $6 million is a dramatically higher number than $100,000 and I am concerned that Stanford may not have been able to adequately monitor the degree of Dr. Schatzberg’s conflicts of interest with its current disclosure policies and submit to you that these policies should be re-examined,” Grassley wrote in a letter to Stanford’s president.
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Grassley, a Republican, has been looking into docs’ financial ties for a while, and he’s been pushing a bill that would require disclosure of industry payments to doctors.
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