Wikimedia Commons, Kuebi The Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) is facing questions after its entire 8-member scientific review council resigned, blaming serious concerns about the integrity of the funding agency’s peer-review procedure. And it seems many of the institute’s roster of 100 expert peer reviewers, based at universities across the country, are also worried enough to quit.
CPRIT was established in 2007 to allocate up to $3 billion dollars from bond sales over 10 years for cancer research and prevention across Texas. But problems surfaced earlier this year with regard to how funding decisions are made.
This past May, Alfred Gilman, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist who served as chief scientific officer of CPRIT, announced that he would step down this fall because the board had approved an “incubator” grant of up to $18 million to the University of Texas (UT) MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston after a 3-week deliberation that did not involve proper scientific review. The board had also delayed grants, many destined for Gilman’s former employer, the UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas—a move that Gilman viewed as an ...
