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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Bradley M. Appelhans

Rush University Medical Center, Department: Public Health & Prev Medicine

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Disclosed Conflict of Interest with

Rush University Medical Center

Disclosed Value
Listed Reason
Intellectual property rights (e.g., royalties, patents, copyrights) not from the awardee Institution

Dr. Applehans has developed an invention that is used in the study. The invention is a food/beverage vending machine that allows the operator to apply different delays to the delivery of each product. Each item sold in the vending machine will be controlled by a programmable timer. After an individual pays for and selects an item, a display associated with the item will show a timer which indicates the amount of time remaining until the product will be dispensed. In addition to the price, the delay to dispensation will be shown below each item. This will enable consumers to consider both price and delay in making their food and beverage choices.

The objective of this invention is to influence the healthfulness of consumers’ vending machine choices without restricting the choices available or by increasing the cost of healthful vs les healthful items, both of which have a number of drawbacks.

The invention has two primary features that are not present in existing food/beverage vending machines: (1) the programmable timer to set dispensation delays, and (2) the display showing the price, dispensation delay, and countdown to dispensation (when purchased).

A provisional patent application has been filed. There have been no financial payments or commercialization of the invention. The product is used in the vending machines, however the data generated from the timing delay is provided by a 3rd party. There is an appearance of conflict and as such the COI Committee has issued a management plan to make his relationship to the invention transparent in oral and written presentations and publications.

Listed Research Project
Time over money? A novel system to influence snack machine choices.

The pervasiveness of high-calorie, nutrient-poor snacks in the environment are believed to have contributed to the epidemic levels of obesity and cardio-metabolic disease in the U.S. This project tests whether a novel snack vending machine system that uses brief time delays to reduce the immediacy of reward from unhealthy snacks will improve the healthfulness of snack choices. If successful, this project will identify a new environmental intervention that could contribute substantially to obesity and cardio-metabolic disease prevention efforts in schools, worksites, and other settings.

Filed on August 10, 2015.

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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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