AUSTIN, Texas — Texas put up $3 billion in taxpayer money and promised cancer breakthroughs. But a criminal investigation, widespread rebuke from scientists and the resignations of state officials happened faster than medical discoveries.
The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas started in 2009, flaunting the second-biggest trough of cancer-research dollars in the country. Nobel laureates eagerly took jobs with the agency and celebrity athlete Lance Armstrong lent support.
Three years later, it’s been unhinged by suggestions of politics and personal profit and is on the ropes.
Embroiled by two lucrative grants approved despite scant review — or none at all, in one case — the institute said the agency is cooperating with separate prosecutor investigations. One, by a public corruption unit, is trying to recover key internal e-mails the institute says it cannot retrieve.
The investigations opened last week after the institute revealed that it had given a private biomedical startup, Dallas-based Peloton Therapeutics, an $11 million award in 2010 without ever scrutinizing the merits of the company’s proposal. The discovery came on the heels of the agency funding a $20 million project roundly condemned for not first undergoing an independent scientific review.
On Friday, the federal National Cancer Institute — which confers the Texas institute the prominent status of being an approved funding entity — confirmed it was evaluating “recent events” at the state agency.
The agency had doled out more than $800 million in three years.
But now the institute’s peer-review boards that evaluate research proposals are empty — virtually all members quit in protest, including the chief science officer and the head of the science review council, both Nobel Prize winners.
Dr. Phillip Sharp, professor at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said agency leaders “dishonored” the integrity of the independent review process and suggested “suspicions of favoritism” were at hand.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 12/16/2012