Cleveland Clinic comes clean on cardiologist

May 5, 2010 by MedCity News

The Cleveland Clinic acknowledges that a former employee, Dr. Jay Yadav, did not break the medical center's ethics policy in 2006.

By Mary Vanac

The Cleveland Clinic admitted that a former staff physician and inventor, Dr. Jay Yadav, did not run afoul of the health system’s conflicts of interest policy, as it claimed in 2006 in 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 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, according to The Heart. Angioguard was sold to Cordis Corp., which merged with Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) 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, according to the website.

"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 wrote on his blog.

Yadav and the clinic 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,” according to the statement. “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 the Piedmont Heart Institute in Atlanta, Ga., Yadav remains focused “on vascular intervention and on creating solutions to the numerous unsolved problems faced by patients,” according to his blog.

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.”