Ten out of 14 members of a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel that recommended the approval of a device designed to repair heart valves had received payments in recent years from its maker Abbott Laboratories, but these potential conflicts of interest were not disclosed in the documents reviewed or produced at the panel’s public meeting.
The large number of payments was discovered by journalists at KFF Health News, a publication of the Kaiser Family Foundation.1 Payments made by US companies to doctors and researchers since 2016 are listed on the publicly available Open Payments database, maintained by the US government.2
FDA regulations do not require the agency to reveal industry payments to its panel members but such disclosures are the norm at medical conferences, the KFF Health News report said. At a recent Boston conference where the device, TriClip, was discussed, speakers were …
