October 14, 2015
Source/realtimeprimers.com
The "Realtime Primers" web page offered the sale of "Validated PCR Primer Sets."
A former cancer research doctor at the University of Pennsylvania was sentenced to a year and one day in federal prison after he pleaded guilty to the theft of nearly $70k in federal funds intended for ovarian cancer research, the United States Attorney's Office announced Wednesday.
Steven W. Johnson, Ph.D., 50, of Elkins Park, Montgomery County, was sentenced after he pleaded guilty on April 30 to one count of misusing federal funds for cancer research to conduct a for-profit business, prosecutors said in a release U.S. District Court Judge Paul S. Diamond also ordered Johnson to pay restitution of $69,379.02 and a $100 special assessment cost.
In a memorandum that was also released on Wednesday, U.S. Attorney Zane Memeger noted that Johnson's crime was "not at all easy to detect" as he was misappropriating funds through a for-profit company he ran as an employee of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Medicine.
As an employee from about October 1998 to February 2010, Johnson conducted cancer research in which he would need to test or “validate” (or to have another University of Pennsylvania employee validate for him) presumptive oligonucleotide “primers,” which are used to identify gene expression patterns, the memorandum said.
In August 2005, as employee of the University of Pennsylvania, the release notes that Johnson started his for-profit company, RealTimePrimers, which advertised human, mouse, and rat validated primers for sale.
Prosecutors said the University of Pennsylvania had no knowledge of Johnson’s for-profit company and in 2006, Johnson applied for a federal grant from the Department of Defense to study a new approach to treating ovarian cancer. With that funding, Johnson purchased thousands of primers from 2007 to 2009, and charged them to the federal grant.
He used the University of Pennsylvania’s laboratory equipment, including a polymerase chain reaction machine, which also had been purchased with federal grant funds, to test, or “validate,” the primers and then sold the validated primers to customers of his for-profit company, the release said.
