Harvard Psychiatrists Hide Millions of Dollars Received from Drug Companies

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(NaturalNews) A congressional investigation has revealed that a group of Harvard psychiatrists, instrumental in pushing the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children and its off-label treatment with antipsychotics, concealed from university officials the millions of dollars they earned in consulting fees for the companies that make those drugs.

Iowa Sen. Charles E. Grassley requested the financial disclosure reports that Drs. Joseph Biederman, Timothy E. Wilens and Thomas Spencer had filed with Harvard University between 2000 and 2007. He then asked a handful of pharmaceutical companies for their own records on how much had been paid to the researchers in that time.

The numbers reported by the drug companies were much higher than those on the researchers' forms.

"Basically, these forms were a mess," Grassley said. "Over the last seven years, it looked like they had taken a couple hundred thousand dollars."

Upon being confronted with the discrepancies, the researchers admitted to having concealed certain consulting fees and upped their estimates. These new numbers still fell short of those reported by the drug companies.

Biederman, for example, originally told Harvard that he had received no money from Johnson & Johnson in 2001. When Grassley asked him to double check, Biederman admitted to receiving $3,500. The drug company's records, however, recorded payments of $58,169 to Biederman in that year alone.

A more thorough investigation revealed that Biederman and Wilens had received at least $1.6 million from the pharmaceutical industry between 2000 and 2007, while Spencer had received at least $1 million.

The researchers' concealment may have violated both university and federal conflict-of-interest rules.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) requires researchers who are receiving federal money to report any earnings of $10,000 or more per year from a single source. This information is reported to the researchers' university, which is then responsible for dealing with potential conflict of interests. The NIH expects universities to take this on because it would be logistically impossible for the agency to do directly.

The NIH gave out a total of $23 billion in grants in 2007, distributed among more than 325,000 researchers at more than 3,000 universities.

But federal and university officials admit that they have no way to check the accuracy of the reported numbers.

"It's really been an honor system thing," said Yale School of Medicine Dean Robert Alpern. "If somebody tells us that a pharmaceutical company pays them $80,000 a year, I don't even know how to check on that."

Each university has different rules to avoid conflicts of interest. Some of them require that study participants be alerted that researchers have received money from the makers of the drug being studied, for example. In 2000, Harvard banned researchers from testing any drugs made by companies that had paid them more than $10,000 in a single year.

In that year, Biederman told Harvard that he had been paid less than $10,000 by Eli Lilly, when in fact he had received more than $14,000. This allowed him to conduct a study of Lilly's attention deficit disorder drug Strattera in children, using money from an NIH grant.

"The information released by Sen. Grassley suggests that, in certain instances, each doctor may have failed to disclose outside income from pharmaceutical companies and other entities that should have been disclosed," Harvard spokesperson Alyssa Kneller said.

According to Kneller, a Harvard university conflict committee is reviewing the professors' cases. The NIH is also investigating.

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