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Executive director of Texas cancer agency resigns

Bob Daemmrich Photography, Inc./CPRIT

William Gimson, the increasingly embattled executive director of the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) is stepping down.

In this 10 December resignation letter, Gimson told the $3 billion agency’s governing board “I have been placed in a situation where I feel I can [no] longer be effective.”

Gimson, who will stay in the job through the governing board’s next meeting on 17 January, added that “the last 8 months have been extremely difficult for those at CPRIT — during this time they have not been able to do their jobs due to wasted efforts expended in low value activities that do nothing to advance cures for cancer.”

Nature called for changes in leadership at the highest levels of CPRIT in this editorial in October.

Before moving to CPRIT almost four years ago, Gimson was chief operating officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where he spent 35 years. His resignation came the same day that the agency named cancer immunologist and former MD Anderson Cancer Center executive vice president Margaret Kripke as its chief scientific officer.

She replaces Nobel laureate Al Gilman, who resigned in protest at the failure of an $18 million grant to MD Anderson to be scientifically reviewed.

CPRIT’s chief commercialization officer, Jerry Cobbs, was forced out on 19 November, and dozens of CPRIT’s scientific peer reviewers have also quit in the wake of Gilman’s resignation.

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