Under pressure from an ongoing US Senate investigation, the National Institutes of Health last week sent reminders to universities that “proper stewardship of Federal funds includes ensuring objectivity of results by protecting federally-funded research from compromise by FCOI,” or financial conflicts of interest.

The August 25 e-mail was written by Norka Ruiz Bravo, the NIH deputy director for extramural research, who last March told The New York Times that “for us to try to manage directly the conflict-of-interest of an NIH investigator would be not only inappropriate but pretty much impossible.” She added that “I think (the system) is working to the extent that people are being honest and I think most people are honest.”

Honesty aside, the Senate Finance Committee subsequently unearthed several notable examples in which academic researchers failed to thoroughly disclose ties to drugmakers at the same time they were conducting research funded, in part, by the NIH. The committee’s examples embarassed Stanford University, Brown University and Harvard University. Look here, here, here and here to read more.

Since 1995, an NIH regulation has required scientists to report to their universities any “significant financial interests” they hold in research projects financed by the agency. Those are defined as income or equity interest of $10,000 from a company or 5-percent ownership of its stock. The universities, in turn, are required to tell the NIH whether they were able to manage or eliminate the conflicts in order to avoid bias in the research findings. Here are the rules.

The failures underscored lax oversight, according to Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the committee, who wants the National Institutes of Health to revoke grants to academic scientists who fail to report financial conflicts of interest to their institutions. Stanford, in fact, last month replaced the lead investigator on one such trial in response to the probe.

In a June 20 letter to Grassley, Elias Zerhouni, the NIH director, offered a mea culpa and wrote that the NIH has been undergoing a “comprehensive review of our oversight.” The recent e-mail from Bravo urges university officials to take a ‘tutorial,’ which is basically a review of NIH policy, but stops short of any further action.