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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Alan Tall
Columbia University Health Sciences, Department: Internal Medicine/medicine
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Fortico Biotech
Equity Interest - Non-publicly traded entity ( e.g., stock, stock option, or other ownership interest)
The work of the new startup company Fortico Biotech is broadly related to research being carried out under HL119830. Work on this grant previously showed that TTC39B, a scaffolding protein, interacts with the Retinoblastoma protein (RB) and promotes its degradation. HL119830 will be conducting experiments in cells and transgenic mice to elucidate the role of TTC39B in the regulation of lipogenesis, lipoproteins and atherosclerosis. These studies will evaluate the hypothesis that the interaction of T39 with RB links lipogenic genes to cell cycle genes, both in proliferating cells and in hyperinsulinemic states.
Fortico will be conducting a screen to find small molecule inhibitors of the TTC39B-RB interaction using a cell based assay that will be developed in the company. The NIH grant does not include experiments to find or use such inhibitors, and the work in Fortico does not depend on studies supported by the NIH grant.
Given these facts, Columbia's FCOI Committee found a possibility that Dr. Tall’s significant financial interest in Fortico could directly and significantly affect the design, conduct or reporting of the R01.
TTC39B in Metabolism
Treatments that reduce lipogenesis in the liver are likely to benefit both fatty liver disease and atherosclerosis. We have identified a novel factor (TTC39B) as a key regulator of hepatic lipogenesis and lipoprotein production. Inhibition of TTC39B has thus emerged as a potential new treatment for these disorders.
Filed on January 31, 2019.
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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.
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