The Texas legislature has left grant money for the state’s conflict-hobbled cancer institute out of the state’s preliminary budget plans.
A joint legislative committee recommended that the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT), based in Austin, should receive only US$5 million a year, down from nearly $300 million a year, according to the Houston Chronicle.
Early budgets often differ substantially from final budgets. Nonetheless, the cancer agency’s allotment is a clear sign of the lawmakers’ displeasure. CPRIT was voted into existence by a large majority of Texas voters in 2007, charged with funding research and education to stop cancer.
But 2012 was a bumpy year. The chief scientific officer, along with many of the agency’s high-profile grant reviewers, resigned in protest, saying that independent peer review had been disrespected. Chief among these concerns was an $18-million grant awarded to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center without scientific peer review. Subsequently, CPRIT announced that another $11-million grant had been awarded to a biotechnology company without peer review, and the district attorney began a criminal investigation, in part because of ties between a political campaign contributor and recipients of poorly reviewed grants.
Since then, both CPRIT’s chief commercial officer and executive director have resigned. A prominent cancer biologist, Margaret Kripke, left retirement to become the agency’s new chief scientific officer.
CPRIT’s new executive director, Wayne Roberts, told the Chronicle that CPRIT would work over the next few months to assure the legislature that CPRIT could allocate money appropriately.
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The Legislature will run through mid-May, and there’s a lot of time and interminable wrangling yet to come on the budget before any final decision is reached. The overall budget picture isn’t quite as bleak as it was two years ago and so there’s some possibility for new funding, but that will come with some pretty severe requirements for improved management oversight and verification of prospective scientific validity in the review process for new grant requests, given past institutional embarrassment from questionable dealings and resignation by many of the credible reviewers in protest.