Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

AUSTIN — University of Texas officials said Wednesday that they will strengthen their conflict of interest policy to keep researchers from getting too cozy with pharmaceutical companies, a response to federal scrutiny into the drug company relationships of some of their scientists.

Though they’re still in the early stages of the policy overhaul, they said they hope to make UT the gold standard for research ethics, and to get out in front of a national movement for greater drug company transparency. The improvements will include an online filing system for disclosures, better monitoring of ethically questionable relationships, and tougher penalties for failing to report drug company income.

“The most important thing is to create in the national mind… that we take this seriously and we’re going to move proactively,” said Barry Burgdorf, UT System vice chancellor and general counsel.

Wednesday’s news, which came at a UT Board of Regents meeting, appears to be a response to an influential U.S. senator’s inquiries into the drug company connections of two renowned UT child psychiatrists. And it follows growing calls for drug companies to report the salaries, stipends, trips and gifts they give doctors and researchers – perks that many fear lead to over-prescribing and biased reviews.

The Texas Attorney General’s office will soon take to trial a drug company it believes used these perks to get its pharmaceuticals onto a state mental health protocol. Some UT researchers working on the protocol were the alleged beneficiaries.

In repeated letters to the UT chancellor’s office this fall, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley requested records on two university researchers he says failed to report tens of thousands of dollars in income from drug companies while receiving federal research grants.

In September, UT defended Dr. Augustus John Rush, a former researcher at UT-Southwestern in Dallas, and Dr. Karen Wagner, who works at the University of Texas Medical Branch, telling The Dallas Morning News that there could’ve been “benevolent reasons for the alleged discrepancies.”

There was no mention of these two researchers Wednesday. Nor does the university have reason to believe the researchers who worked on the state mental health protocol are under investigation, Burgdorf said — though the AG’s office hasn’t told them that formally.

“There is appropriate concern that if individuals have [pharmaceutical] interests… it has the potential to undermine the integrity of the research,” said UT-Southwestern Medical Center president Dr. Daniel Podolsky, who also serves on the drug company GlaxoSmithKline’s board of directors. “We need to be sure physicians in our centers aren’t letting that intrude on their judgment of what pharmaceuticals should be on our formularies.”