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.

Financial doc
Filing Type

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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Vadim Backman

Northwestern University, Department: Biomedical Engineering

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Disclosed Conflict of Interest with

NanoCytomics

Disclosed Value
Listed Reason
Payment for services (e.g., consulting fees, honoraria, paid authorship)

The research is related to the focus of an entity in which Professor Backman has significant financial interests, NanoCytomics. NanoCytomics has licensed intellectual property arising from Northwestern research related to a technology platform within the field of nanocytology that is intended to identify patients that are likely to benefit from gold-standard cancer diagnostic procedures. Partial wave spectroscopic (PWS) microscopy is a breakthrough technology platform that enables quantification of the nanoscale architecture of the cell with unprecedented accuracy.

This research aims to refine PWS to give faster results and help identify patients that require diagnostic testing This work relates to intellectual property owned by NanoCytomics and new intellectual property arising from this research will likely utilize NanoCytomics as a commercial vehicle. Therefore, a potential conflict of interest exists regarding Professor Backman’s NanoCytomics interests and this research that should be managed.

Listed Research Project
Risk-stratification of Prostate Cancers via Field Carcinogenesis Nanocytology

Prostate cancer is the leading cancer among U.S. men. The biggest limitation of current prostate cancer management that it is essentially impossible to accurately prognosticate which patients harbor aggressive cancers that progress into a metastatic disease and need treatment and which patients have non-aggressive indolent cancers that would not pose harm. Technology developed in the proposed project will address this issue by detecting alterations in nanoscale morphology of prostate epithelial cells that are highly predictive of the risk of progression.

Filed on August 31, 2015.

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Name Institution Type Company Disclosed Value
Vadim Backman Northwestern University Conflict of Interest Nanocytomics, LLC $150,000 - $199,999
Vadim Backman Northwestern University Conflict of Interest NanoCytomics, LLC $150,000 - $199,999
Vadim Backman Northwestern University Conflict of Interest Nanocytomics $80,000 - $99,999
Vadim Backman Northwestern University Conflict of Interest Nanocytomics $20,000 - $39,999
Vadim Backman Northwestern University Conflict of Interest American BioOptics $0 - $4,999
Vadim Backman Northwestern University Conflict of Interest NanoCytomics Value cannot be readily determined
Vadim Backman Northwestern University Conflict of Interest American BioOptics Value cannot be readily determined
Vadim Backman Northwestern University Conflict of Interest NanoCytomics, LLC Value cannot be readily determined
Vadim Backman Northwestern University Conflict of Interest Nanocytomics, LLC Value cannot be readily determined
If you see an error in the database or a reason we should not disclose a record, please contact us at [email protected] and we'll evaluate it on a case-by-case basis.
Sources: National Institutes of Health, public records requests filed at multiple public state universities

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.

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