The University of Michigan School of Medicine recently jumped on the no-pharma-funding bandwagon: It will stop accepting commercial support of CME on January 1, 2011. According to a statement by the dean of the medical school and associate dean of regulatory affairs, “The decision was based on a review of literature about the influence on clinical faculty of industry-funded CME.”

The Sloan Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in New York and Kaiser Permanente’s mid-Atlantic region also have banned commercial support of CME. Stanford University announced in 2008 that it would no longer allow pharma to earmark support for specific activities, though it was criticized earlier this year for accepting a $3 million Pfizer block grant that would be applied to CME activities in areas of mutual interest. Stanford maintains that "The Pfizer grant comes with no conditions, and the company will not be involved in developing the curriculum,” according to a medical school press release. [The previous two sentences have been amended since the original posting.] Medical schools in California, Colorado, Kansas, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania also have curtailed commercial support of CME.

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