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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Basak Uygun
Massachusetts General Hospital, Department: Na
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Organ Solutions, LLC
Equity Interest - Non-publicly traded entity ( e.g., stock, stock option, or other ownership interest)
Dr. Uygun’s spouse, (b)(6), is a co-founder of Organ Solutions, LLC. Dr. Basak Uygun does not own any equity in the company other than through her husband. The company is developing perfusion systems and services for organ preservation with the goal of improving organ viability and maximizing the time to transplant. Two of the goals of this grant are to 1) develop a liver perfusion system and, 2) develop whole organ perfusion- decellularization and recellularization methodology. New IP resulting from this R00 grant may be of interest to Organ Solutions, LLC. The Co-Chairs of Partners HealthCare Committee on Outside Activities evaluated the financial interest in connection with this research and determined that, based on the close connection between the company's interests and the research, the financial interest could directly and significantly affect the design, conduct, or reporting of the research.
Use of Discarded Organs for Preparation of Liver Grafts
PROJECT NARRATIVE Treatment for end-stage organ failure is restricted by the critical shortage of donor organs with the organ waiting list currently at 100,000 requests and it is increasing by 5% every year. The problem is not different for liver, which this study focuses on - about 4,000 people die in the US due to lack of a transplantable organ, and the lack of donor organs is considered a major health crisis. In addition, since transplantation can often be the solution to many aging related diseases, the hidden demand is estimated to be far beyond the current levels. This situation has been a major driving force behind the rise of tissue engineering, with the market for organ failure treatments estimated at about $80 billion. However, over two decades of work aimed at building tissues from the ground up has not succeeded in creating large-scale tissues that can be clinically implanted to address the void in organ replacement therapies. Further, despite intense efforts on the stem cell front, including those from our group, the lack of a reliable cell source for primary adult hepatocytes for use in cell therapies persists and is unlikely to be resolved in the near future. Reengineering discarded livers to create functional liver grafts is an innovative endeavor, as it has the potential to become a novel platform for hepatic tissue engineering. The work described here is expected to i) establish marginal livers as a reliable source of primary hepatocytes, ii) establish decellularized liver slices as novel 3D cell culture platform to study the role of ECM, iii) develop humanized rat liver grafts as a three dimensional liver model for pharmaceutical studies, and iv) lead to the development of reengineered liver grafts to treat liver diseases. While this work utilizes liver as the model organ, the results of this work will also have a positive impact by establishing the basis of future sophisticated organ engineering techniques that incorporate multiple different cell types and can be translated to other organs (such as pancreas to create vascularized patches for pancreatic ?-cell transplantation), and may ultimately lead to development of entire organs in vitro.
Filed on September 12, 2014.
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Basak Uygun filed other conflict of interest disclosures with the NIH:
| Name | Institution | Type | Company | Disclosed Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basak Uygun | Massachusetts General Hospital | Conflict of Interest | Organ Solutions, LLC | 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.
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