UC San Diego Shiley Eye Institute’s chief of eye genetics, Kang Zhang, has resigned due to possible involvement with a foreign government and businesses that are under FBI scrutiny. Zhang is a member of the Thousand Talents Program, who according to the FBI, “incentivizes scientists to illegally take intellectual property developed at U.S. universities to China” as a way to better develop the country’s economic, scientific, and military goals.
Zhang founded and is a shareholder of a Chinese biotechnology company that specializes in the same work that he completed at UCSD. However, it has not been confirmed whether he illegally took the intellectual information abroad.
UCSD officials have declined to state whether they were aware of Zhang’s foreign business involvements or whether they received a letter from the National Institutes of Health encouraging them to investigate Zhang because of his noncompliance. Zhang did not disclose any of his pharmaceutical businesses on forms required by both university policies and federal regulations.
Two years after Zhang was recruited to join the Thousand Talents Program in 2010, he created the company CalCyte Therapeutics with NIH small business grants. The company was established to develop treatment for age-related macular degeneration.
Though CalCyte had a contract with UCSD for research, Zhang failed to include the company in his conflict of interest disclosures with the Shiley Eye Institute at UCSD. Zhang’s disclosure was never received by the Institute, despite it being a university and federal requirement.
Once CalCyte’s grant-funded work was finished, Zhang founded the Chinese corporation Guangzhou Kangrui Biological Pharmaceutical Technology Co., whose purpose was to develop new drugs and research for ophthalmology. Zhang also failed to disclose his relations with any of these companies or declare any conflicts of interest to UCSD.
