Paige.AI and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Relationship Raises Questions

Paige.AI, a pathology artificial intelligence (AI) startup made some headlines yesterday in reference to its access to an archive of 25 million pathology slides at Memorial Sloan Kettering. The story was published by ProPublica yesterday.

Back in February of this year, we shared a press release mentioning $25 million dollars in Series A funding and 25 million slides from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Now there are concerns about the nature of a for-profit venture with exclusive rights to the archived material. It is probably fair to say that the recent news concerning Memorial’s chief medical officer, Dr. Jose Baselga, and his failure to make necessary financial disclosures has, in part, caused the institution to look at its relationships with industry. A new task force has been formed to review the hospital’s conflict-of-interest policies.

According to the story on ProPublica, hospital pathologists have “strongly objected to the Paige.AI deal”, claiming it is “unfair that the founders received equity stakes in a company that relies on the pathologists’ expertise and work amassed over 60 years.”

After ProPublica and The New York Times began asking questions about the arrangement, one of the founders — Dr. David Klimstra, the chairman of the pathology department — said he would divest his ownership stake per the article. The link provided in the story to the company website still lists Dr. Klimstra as of this post.

These relationships between medical institutions and industry are often complex and require appropriate disclosures and transparency. While life saving inventions and drugs and being discovered, the issues of patient privacy, medical data, research consent and use of tissues/cells/images has to be worked out with full transparency.

For many years, these relationships have come under increasing scrutiny after numerous articles about financial conflicts of interest (or the appearance of such), plagiarism, “ghost writing”, copyright issues and false research have brought to light issues of integrity surrounding medical research.

In that respect, this story, is not new or unique. The concern of a department full of physicians thinking people are making money off their backs in their private ventures is nothing new. The idea of intellectual property being owned, shared, consented, etc… is nothing new.

The balance of trying to help people and fund the activities and capitalize on those is not new or in and of itself unique for any of our nation’s largest hospitals and medical schools. It’s how scientific discoveries come to market.

What appears to me a major issue here is — what’s being commercialized is not an invention, per se, but rather access to raw materials — notes and slides — gathered over decades.

The full article goes on to talk about the fallout since the creation of the company and the internal issues in the department.

We as pathologists, as patient advocates and technology advocates, as advocates of advancing medical science, sometimes with small incremental steps or with quantum leaps have to insure we do what is right by the patient, our departments, our colleagues and our hospitals while navigating commercial issues that may be at odds by the very nature of “not-for-profit” and “for-profit” trying to work together.

Read full article here.