This article was reported and written in a collaboration with ProPublica, the nonprofit journalism organization.
Dr. Craig B. Thompson, the chief executive of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, said Tuesday that he would resign his seats on the boards of drug maker Merck and another public company, the latest fallout from a growing institutional reckoning over relationships between cancer center leaders and for-profit health care companies.
Dr. Thompson has served on the board of Merck, the maker of the blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda, since 2008. He has been on the board of Charles River Laboratories, a publicly traded company that assists research in early drug development, since 2013.
Dr. Thompson received $300,000 in compensation from Merck in 2017, according to company financial filings. He was paid $70,000 in cash by Charles River in 2017, plus $215,050 in stock.
The compensation for the two corporate boards came in addition to what he was paid as chief executive at Memorial Sloan Kettering. In 2016, he earned $6.7 million in total compensation from the cancer center and related organizations, according to the most recent Internal Revenue Service filings.
His resignations are effective immediately.
“I believe this is the right decision for Memorial Sloan Kettering and will allow me to redouble my focus on M.S.K. priorities: quality patient care, faculty, scientists and staff,” Dr. Thompson said in a memo sent to the hospital staff. He has been the chief executive of the hospital since 2010.
The move followed two tense meetings at the hospital on Monday, spurred by articles by The New York Times and ProPublica, about insider deals among hospital officials and undisclosed industry relationships.
At one meeting with hospital staff, Dr. Thompson apologized for his handling of staff reaction to the articles, and acknowledged that he had not properly reined in the industry relationships of the hospital’s former chief medical officer, Dr. José Baselga, who has since resigned.
At another meeting, reserved for medical staff members, some doctors said they were interested in calling a no-confidence vote in the hospital’s top leaders, and asked what steps they needed to take to do that, according to several participants in the meeting. No such vote has been scheduled.
Dr. Thompson also said Tuesday that the hospital would conduct an analysis to understand what had gone wrong at the hospital in recent weeks “so that we ensure our path forward is expertly guided by what we learn.”
Dr. Thompson’s resignation from the boards of Merck and Charles River Laboratories does not affect the eight other Memorial Sloan Kettering officials who serve on the boards of outside companies. A task force that was created in the wake of the crisis over conflicts of interest is considering a policy that would prohibit executives from holding such roles, hospital leaders have said.
Dr. Thompson’s seat on the Merck board was brought up at Monday’s staff meeting. Douglas A. Warner III, chairman of the hospital’s board of directors, said that when Dr. Thompson arrived at Memorial Sloan Kettering, the hospital board viewed his position at Merck as a “good thing.”
On Monday, Mr. Warner said, “we need to step back from that now and ask ourselves whether that continues to be appropriate, whether it’s appropriate in the future.”
Charles Ornstein is a senior editor at ProPublica.
