Big Tobacco Funding for Cancer Research Decried

March 27, 2008 — -- A leading lung cancer researcher received funding from a tobacco company and failed to disclose the source of her funding in published studies, according to reports in two publications.

The news of tobacco funding for studies of lung cancer screening has set off a firestorm among medical researchers.

The disclosures involve not only questions about whether a leading academic institution did enough to disclose that funding for the study was coming from tobacco maker Liggett Group Inc., but also whether the world's leading medical journal knew about the potential conflict.

In October 2006, Dr. Claudia Henschke and colleagues from Cornell University published findings in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that suggested screening smokers and former smokers with chest CT scans could dramatically cut lung cancer deaths, possibly by 80 percent.

At the end of the article, the authors stated: "No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported."

When it became widely known that Henschke had received significant funding from Liggett, other prestigious journals like the Journal of the American Medical Association updated their disclosure statements for Henschke's articles, NEJM has yet to make any such change.

However, public tax records revealed that the little-known charity run by award-winning cancer researchers at Cornell identified in the research papers as partly funding the research.

According to the Cancer Letter, a newsletter on cancer research and funding, researchers led by Henschke failed to disclose to scientific journals that there were connections between the charity and the cigarette maker.

The Cancer Letter also stated that when she published her research in NEJM, Henschke failed to disclose information about 27 patents that she had for a lung cancer screening technology she had developed. In a letter to Dr. Bruce Chabner, editor of the journal The Oncologist, Henschke confirmed that Cornell receives royalties from some of these licensed patents.