7 ADVISERS RESIGN AT EMBATTLED TEXAS CANCER AGENCY

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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- At least seven scientists resigned in protest this week from Texas' embattled $3 billion cancer-fighting program, claiming the agency created with the backing of the governor and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong is charting a new "politically-driven" path that puts commercial interests before science.

The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas has awarded nearly $700 million in grants since 2009, making Texas home to the nation's biggest pot of cancer-research dollars behind only the federal National Institutes of Health. But how the state agency picks projects has fallen under intensifying scrutiny, beginning in May when its chief scientific officer resigned in protest after it approved - without scientific review - a $20 million commercialization project.

Nobel laureate Dr. Phillip Sharp was among those stepping down this week, writing in his resignation letter that the CPRI is making funding decisions that carry a "suspicion of favoritism" in how the state is handing out taxpayer dollars. Dr. Bryan Dynlacht, another reviewer who's leaving, warned that the agency was headed down a path of systematic abuses.

"You may find that it was not worth subverting the entire scientific enterprise - and my understanding was that the intended goal of CPRIT was to fund the best cancer research in Texas - on account of this ostensibly new, politically driven, commercialization-based mission," Dynlacht wrote in his letter.