Dollars for Profs
Dig Into University Researchers' Outside Income and Conflicts of Interest
Published Dec. 6, 2019
This database was last updated in December 2019 and should only be used as a historical snapshot. There may be new or amended records not reflected here.
Conflict of Interest
Institutions must file significant disclosures to the National Institutes of Health if they determine financial relationships could affect the design, conduct or reporting of the NIH-funded research. The NIH provided us with their entire financial conflict of interest database, with filings from 2012 through 2019.
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James Heath
California Institute of Technology, Department: None
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Isoplexis
Payment for services (e.g., consulting fees, honoraria, paid authorship)
Isoplexis is a company that is commercializing a service based upon advanced immune monitoring of patients participating in cancer immunotherapy clinical trials, and they are primarily working with pharma companies who are commercializing cell-based cancer immunotherapies. Isoplexis’ base technology is the single cell barcode chip (SCBC) for analysis of secreted proteins from various anti-cancer immune cell phenotypes. That technology was developed in the Heath lab, as reported in Nature Medicine in 2011 and Cancer Discovery in 2013 and Cell Stem Cell in 2014, and further developed by a former postdoc and current Yale faculty member Prof. Rong Fan. The use of the SCBC technology in Project 3 for monitoring immune response in T cells, which is a minor component of Aim 2, is potentially relevant to Isoplexis’ work and interests. That Project 3, Aim 2 SCBC work does not involve any new technology development and so is unlikely to lead to any new intellectual property that relates to the Isoplexis’ platform. It can potentially reveal the importance of single cell proteomic analysis for understanding the anti-cancer behaviors of tumor infiltrating immune cells. That is of general scientific interest to the community, to Isoplexis, and its customers.
The Heath lab has since moved away from developing SCBC technologies for the analysis of secreted proteins from immune cells(since it is being commercialized), and is now focusing on analyzing panels of metabolites and intracellular proteins and phosphoproteins) from single cells, as described in Project 4 of the NSBCC grant. Those newer technologies are designed for the analysis of tumor tissues, not immune cell phenotypes, and so are not connected to the current work of Isoplexis.
Isoplexis may have a future interest in certain data, assays and technologies, such as those described in Projects 3 and 4, but they have not expressed such an interest. The management plan for this conflict of interest is attached.
Nanosystems Biology Cancer Center
The importance of the NSBCC project to human health Once a patient's cancer has advanced beyond a surgical cure, no single available therapy has shown efficacy for promoting a durable and long-term remission. Of course, the standard combinations of radiation and chemotherapy provide a more effective treatment than either one alone, but modern cancer therapy presents a host of less toxic and more promising therapies, in the form of targeted inhibitors and immunotherapies. Immunotherapies, in particular, have been in the news recently because of the remarkable success they have had in providing certain classes of cancer patients with durable responses, while at the same time being relatively well-tolerated. However, even for those therapies, the responding patient populations, and the cancer class that can be treated, are highly selective. Identifying and delivering effective combination immunotherapies or combination targeted therapies has thus emerged as a very significant challenge in clinical cancer care. The proposed NSBCC has four highly complementary scientific projects that are specifically aimed at developing nanotechnologies that can help identify or deliver effective therapy combinations for both targeted inhibitors and cancer immunotherapies. The project is strongly connected to clinical programs to help ensure effective clinical translation.
Filed on January 08, 2016.
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James Heath filed other conflict of interest disclosures with the NIH:
| Name | Institution | Type | Company | Disclosed Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| James Heath | California Institute of Technology | Conflict of Interest | PACT Pharma | $10,000 - $19,999 |
| James Heath | California Institute of Technology | Conflict of Interest | Isoplexis | $10,000 - $19,999 |
| James Heath | California Institute of Technology | Conflict of Interest | InDi Molecular | $5,000 - $9,999 |
| James Heath | California Institute of Technology | Conflict of Interest | InDi Molecular | $0 - $4,999 |
| James Heath | California Institute of Technology | Conflict of Interest | Sofie Biosciences | $0 - $4,999 |
| James Heath | California Institute of Technology | Conflict of Interest | PACT Pharma | $0 - $4,999 |
| James Heath | California Institute of Technology | Conflict of Interest | InDi Molecular | $0 - $4,999 |
| James Heath | California Institute of Technology | Conflict of Interest | Sofie Biosciences | $0 - $4,999 |
Notes: When a more specific filing date is not available for an individual financial disclosure or conflict of interest form, we use the year the form was filed. If the year was not disclosed, we report the range of years covered by our public records requests. In a few cases, a start date was provided instead of a filing date. In those cases, we use the start date instead.
Fewer than 10% of records from the University of Florida and fewer than 1% of records from the University of Texas system were removed because they did not contain enough information.
ProPublica obtained additional financial disclosures and conflict of interest forms that we have not yet digitized and added to the database. You can download those disclosures in the ProPublica Data Store.