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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Catherine Wu
Dana Farber Cancer Inst, Department: Na
Should you be removed from our database? Contact us at [email protected]. Read more below.
Neon Therapuetics
Equity Interest - Non-publicly traded entity ( e.g., stock, stock option, or other ownership interest)
Dr. Wu and her spouse both serve on the SAB of Neon Therapeutics. The SFIs reported reflect their combined financial interests.
Neon Therapeutics has licensed technology to develop personalized neoantigen cancer vaccines. The goal of the company is to develop cancer vaccines specifically designed for individual patients by first sequencing the individual’s tumor and then synthesizing a unique peptide based on the tumor’s sequence to then use as a vaccine in the patient.
This NIH grant involves research into the mechanisms by which neoantigens elicit immune responses and by which tumor-host immunity co-evolve. Specifically, the grant aims to expand the classes of targetable personal cancer neoantigens through transcriptome-based analysis of somatic alterations, to improve the rules for predicting cancer neoantigens from sequencing data, and to determine the co-evolution of immune response and chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) in relation to neoantigen-specific immunity. The DFCI Conflicts of Interest Committee evaluated Dr. Wu’s financial interest and determined that, based on the close connection between the interests of the company and this research, the financial interest could directly and significantly affect the design, conduct, or reporting of the research.
Personal tumor neoantigens for immunity against chronic lymphocytic leukemia
Cancer immunotherapy has been demonstrated to provide remarkable clinical benefit. Much of its potency arises from patient T cells precisely targeting th tumor for destruction through their recognition of specific molecules on the surface of the tumor cells. Our research program has centered on the study of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and has pioneered the detection and characterization of a high priority subset of these surface molecules, called mutated peptides that arise directly from cancer mutations, and hence are exquisitely tumor-specific. Recent studies have established these mutated peptides as key players in generating productive patient immune responses. We propose to build an integrated program using innovative genomic technologies and mass spectrometry in order to better detect both patient-specific mutated peptides as well as the diversity of T cells that recognize them so that we can understand how this interaction shapes the genetic changes in CLL cells themselves over time and in response to immunotherapy exposure.
Filed on June 09, 2017.
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Catherine Wu filed other conflict of interest disclosures with the NIH:
| Name | Institution | Type | Company | Disclosed Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Catherine Wu | Dana Farber Cancer Inst | Conflict of Interest | Neon Therapuetics | $100,000 - $149,999 |
| Catherine Wu | Dana Farber Cancer Inst | Conflict of Interest | Neon Therapeutics | $100,000 - $149,999 |
| Catherine Wu | Dana Farber Cancer Inst | Conflict of Interest | Neon Therapeutics | Value cannot be readily determined |
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.