CPRIT Official Indicted for Skipping Peer Review

A grand jury in Travis County, Texas, indicted a former official of the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas for bypassing peer review in awarding an $11 million grant to a Dallas-based company.

Jerald Cobbs, the former CPRIT chief commercialization officer, was indicted on a felony charge of deceiving two of his CPRIT colleagues in 2010 by failing to disclose that the grant to Peloton Therapeutics Inc. was not subjected to review of either its science or its commercial potential.

The indictment was dated Dec. 3.

Cobbs, 62, is charged with securing execution of a document by deception, a first degree felony punishable by imprisonment of five to 99 years and a $10,000 fine.

Cobbs was also a key player in awarding an $18 million grant to a Houston-area biotechnology incubator led by Lynda Chin, scientific director of the MD Anderson Cancer Center Institute for Applied Cancer Science and wife of the center’s president, Ronald DePinho (The Cancer Letter, May 25, 2012).

Cobbs sought to fund IACS as a biotech incubator, allowing to bypass scientific review of individual projects, but that award was never finalized and money didn’t change hands.

Overall, the cases of Peloton and MD Anderson are so fundamentally different that they provide an opportunity to distinguish lawful conduct from felonious in the uppermost business and political spheres in Texas:

• Both Peloton and the MD Anderson incubator seek to commercialize intellectual property that emerges from academia. The difference: Peloton is a classic spin-off company, while IACS is an effort to grow a drug company within an academic institution.

• Peloton didn’t seek special treatment by CPRIT. By contrast, DePinho, Chin, and top Texas politicians clearly sought to bypass scientific review—and engineered procedures for commercial review—to secure funds for the incubator built around IACS.

• The Peloton grant was, in fact, awarded. Efforts to award money to the MD Anderson incubator proposal were thwarted after CPRIT’s chief scientific officer, Alfred Gilman, turned whistleblower, triggering a massive scandal closely watched by everyone in cancer science.

The pivotal role Cobbs played in the coordinated effort to bypass scientific peer review and channel public funds to MD Anderson’s IACS also warrants a look back at the controversy that went public when Gilman, a Nobel laureate, brought attention to the unseemly backroom dealings and—ultimately—left CPRIT, slamming the door behind him.

Gilman’s departure was followed by investigations into multiple aspects of CPRIT’s activities by several law enforcement agencies, including the Travis County Public Integrity Unit.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is conducting a separate investigation of CPRIT. Abbott, who sat on the CPRIT oversight committee, is also running for governor in 2014.

Announcing the Cobbs indictment, Travis County Assistant District Attorney Rob Drummond said the grand jury was asked to review the materials stemming from the MD Anderson IACS controversy and materials related to CTNeT, a now-defunct statewide network focused on cancer clinical trials. “The grand jury didn’t choose to issue indictments related to those matters,” Drummond said. Efforts to reach Cobbs were unsuccessful.