It’s easy money: Lab offers doctors up to $144,000 a year to push dubious genetic tests, employees say
By Charles Piller,
STAT
| 02. 28. 2017
For doctors, the brochure from a California medical laboratory sounded like easy money: $30 for every person enrolled in a study of genetic tests meant to help select the best pain medication for each patient. A typical physician could make $144,000 a year in “research fees.”
But the clinical trial was largely a ploy to boost Proove Biosciences’s revenues, and many of the doctors who signed up did no actual work, say current and former employees.
Proove has grown rapidly by tapping into the public angst over surging opioid addiction. It is one of many companies touting personalized DNA-based tests backed by little or no credible scientific data showing their reliability. That’s because a regulatory loophole has left huge swaths of the multibillion-dollar genetic testing industry largely free of government oversight.
A STAT investigation found that Proove employees stationed in physicians’ offices pushed unnecessary tests on patients — a practice called “coercion” by one former manager — and they sometimes completed research evaluation forms on behalf of doctors, rating the tests as highly effective when they weren’t. In fact, Proove...
Related Articles
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...
By Jonathan D. Grinstein, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | 06.26.2024
Partial screenshot from The Bridge Recombination Mechanism
video by The Arc Institute on YouTube (CC)
Buried in a family of mobile genetic elements, Arc Institute researchers led by Patrick Hsu, PhD, have discovered an RNA-guided system that enables modular...
By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times | 05.31.2024
Last year, Jaume Pellicer led a team of fellow scientists into a forest on Grande Terre, an island east of Australia. They were in search of a fern called Tmesipteris oblanceolata. Standing just a few inches tall, it was not...
By Liz Szabo, The New York Times | 05.29.2024
By the time Rena Barrow-Wells gave birth to her fourth baby in 2020, she was well-versed in caring for a child with cystic fibrosis. She was also experienced in fighting for a diagnosis of the disease, which runs in families...