Officials: CPRIT was young, but Cobbs should have known better

AUSTIN — A current and a former official of Texas’ cancer-fighting agency acknowledged Friday that the agency was very new when its internal cheerleader for commercial projects allegedly skipped steps and rushed through an $11 million grant to a Dallas biotech firm.

But Jerald “Jerry” Cobbs still should have known that peer review was needed before the money could be approved for Peloton Therapeutics, said the agency’s chief operating officer, Heidi McConnell, and its former executive director, Bill Gimson.

“He should have advised the oversight committee” that the firm was lacking such a review, McConnell testified at
Cobbs’ trial.

Gimson said Cobbs omitted “very important” information from emails one week before the grant was approved in June 2010 – that there was push back from members of a peer-review panel to an expedited assessment of Peloton, then known as Damascus Therapeutics.

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