NEW YORK, July 29 /PRNewswire/ -- On Thursday, July 22, a federal court jury found that Cornell University's Weill Medical College and a former faculty member submitted false claims to the National Institutes of Health on three separate occasions from 1999-2001 arising from a grant designed to train neuropsychologists for a research career in HIV/AIDS.

The grant was awarded by the NIH from funds specifically allocated by Congress for HIV/AIDS research. A clinical neuropsychologist then at Cornell, Wilfred van Gorp, now at Columbia, applied for a training grant from NIH, promising to train post-doctoral fellows committed to a career in research in the neuropsychology of HIV/AIDS.

One of those fellows, Daniel Feldman, brought suit under a federal whistleblower statute, known as the False Claims Act, alleging that van Gorp and Cornell instead used the funds for inappropriate purposes, including requiring the fellows to see an excess of private fee-for-service patients with other medical conditions. At trial, Dr. Feldman showed that of approximately 160 clinical patients seen by the fellows over five years on the NIH-grant, only three patients were HIV- positive. Instead of seeing HIV- patients, the fellows often evaluated "medicolegal" cases, referred by insurance companies or attorneys who were in litigation over disability or worker's compensation claims, or criminal defendants. Indeed, Dr. van Gorp was well-known for his expert witness testimonies for the defense of several high-profile criminal defendants in New York during that period, including mob boss Vincente Gigante and Andrew Goldstein, the "subway pusher."

The jury specifically found that, over the course of the five-year grant, Dr. van Gorp and Cornell knowingly submitted three progress reports containing false or fraudulent statements to NIH in order to continue the funding of the grant. The original grant application had described a rich program of faculty and research resources, along with a detailed core curriculum, including courses in HIV/AIDS. Dr. Feldman and his counsel, Michael J. Salmanson, of Salmanson Goldshaw, P.C. of Philadelphia, argued during the course of the 8-day trial that the original grant application and the subsequent progress reports contained numerous false statements designed to convince NIH to originally secure and then continue the funding.

Dr. Feldman agreed that the fellows had spent some of their time in research-related activities, but at least as much of that activity was related to medicolegal research as it was to HIV. Indeed, Dr. van Gorp had argued in his initial grant application to the NIH that clinical work is a "springboard" for developing research activities, and considering the disproportionate number of medicolegal cases that the fellows evaluated, the focus of the their research followed. Other key issues argued in the suit over the grant application and its progress reports were formal HIV-courses that were never taught, key faculty on the grant who were never introduced to the fellows, and a breadth of HIV-research to which the fellows were never exposed.