Fired worker put ‘erroneous’ info and insults in cancer study database, feds in CA say
A former university employee accused of accessing a breast cancer study database and changing patient information “hours after she was fired” is facing up to 21 years in prison following her conviction in federal court in California, prosecutors said.
The woman logged into the database and replaced “patient medical data with erroneous information and insults about her former supervisor,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California said in a Feb. 24 news release.
A jury convicted the 66-year-old of two counts of intentional damage to a protected computer and one count of accessing a protected computer without authorization, prosecutors said.
She’s scheduled to be sentenced in July, according to prosecutors.
McClatchy News reached out to her attorney Feb. 27 and was awaiting a response.
The woman worked as a research coordinator at Stanford University’s cancer institute, prosecutors said.
She was assigned to a study sponsored by a biotech firm that “sought to determine the safety and efficacy of a new, experimental pharmaceutical treatment for patients with metastatic or locally advanced breast cancer,” according to prosecutors.
Her duties included “accurately entering patient medical data into the study database,” prosecutors said.
But she was fired on Aug. 19, 2013, and later that night, before a request to terminate her database access was fulfilled, she logged in and changed data, prosecutors said.
Stanford investigated and “reentered all of the data about its participants in the study from source documents into the study database, and reported the incident to local and federal regulatory authorities, including the FDA,” prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said the woman, who was indicted in 2018, cost Stanford thousands of dollars.
“Her senseless actions undermined a study into the safety and efficacy of a new treatment for breast cancer patients,” Acting U.S. Attorney Patrick D. Robbins said in the release. “The jury’s verdict holds the defendant accountable for her crimes.”
Stanford is about a 35-mile drive southeast from San Francisco.
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