The Cleveland Clinic has admitted that its former staff physician and inventor, Dr. Jay Yadav, did not run afoul of the health system’s conflicts of interest policy as it had claimed in 2006 while declining to renew Yadav’s employment contract.
Yadav, an interventional cardiologist, entrepreneur and head of the Clinic’s innovations unit at the time of his departure, sued the institution in 2007, claiming it had done irreparable harm to his good name as a researcher and clinician by what it said about him during interviews with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, according to The Heart.
The interviews led to a story that suggested Yadav had repeatedly failed to fully disclose financial gains related to the sale of AngioGuard — a blood-filtering device Yadav invented and commercialized at a company with the same name, The Heart reported. Angioguard was sold to Cordis, which merged with Johnson & Johnson in 1996. Yadav was appointed at the Cleveland Clinic in 1998.
Yadav also claimed the Clinic painted him as guilty of scientific misconduct during clinical trials of the device, The Heart said. Yadav said at his blog: “I am fighting back against the unfair and improper actions of the Cleveland Clinic administration. I have sued them to correct the public record and seek redress for the harm they caused my family and me.”
Yadav and the Clinic have settled the lawsuit for undisclosed terms. “Cleveland Clinic acknowledges that Dr. Yadav did disclose an interest in the sale of Angioguard Inc. to Cordis Inc. while conducting research sponsored by Cordis,” the Clinic said in a joint statement with Yadav.
“Cleveland Clinic commissioned an independent review, which concluded that the integrity of Dr. Yadav’s research regarding Angioguard/Cordis was not compromised by his financial relationships with Angioguard/Cordis,” the joint statement said. “Cleveland Clinic recognizes Dr. Yadav’s valuable contributions to cardiology during his tenure at Cleveland Clinic, and Cleveland Clinic and Dr. Yadav wish each other continuing success.”
“I am happy to have this behind me,” Yadav told The Heart. Now a cardiologist at Piedmont Heart Institute in Atlanta, Ga., Yadav said at his blog that he remains focused “on vascular intervention and on creating solutions to the numerous unsolved problems faced by patients.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
He also said he is “leading CardioMEMS Inc., a company that I had started several years ago at Georgia Tech, in its development of better treatments for heart failure patients.”
