What happened to a Hialeah doctor who made up clinical trial data for a kids’ asthma drug
A South Florida doctor lost her medical license 17 months after she admitted her clinical trial for a children’s asthma drug was a pile of data lies.
In Dr. Yvelice Villaman-Bencosme’s guilty plea to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, she admitted falsifying the data for a clinical trial she ran while at Unlimited Medical Research from 2013 to 2016. Villaman-Bencosme, now 66, worked in Pembroke Pines and Northwest Miami-Dade, lived in Hialeah and has been living in the federal prison in Marianna since March. The federal Bureau of Prisons database says her release date from FCI Marianna is Sept. 11, 2026.
READ MORE: Miami doctor pleads guilty to falsifying clinical trial data for asthma medication
The state Board of Medicine’s license final order revoking Villaman-Bencosme’s license, which online Florida Department of Health records say she’d held since July 1993, posted Aug. 15. That profile claims staff privileges at Miami Children’s Hospital and board certification by the American Board of Pediatrics, although her name appears nowhere in a certification search of that organization.
Making stuff up about drugs
The administrative complaint filed against Villaman-Bencosme’s license says Unlimited was hired in October 2013 to do a study of a drug designed to treat pediatric asthma. She was Unlimited’s clinical medical investigator.
Villaman-Bencosme’s guilty plea admission of facts says she and others working with her got personal information from driver’s licenses and birth certificates in patient records from her private pediatric practice. With that information, they formed case histories that made it look like the children who were her patients had been used in the study.
They “caused false information to be entered in the case histories to make it appear that subjects had, among other things, satisfied the eligibility criteria to participate in the study;” her factual proffer statement says, “provided informed consent to participate in the study; received a physical examination conducted by [Villman-Bencosme]; received the study drug at the company location; returned the study drug containers to the company location; and received payment for visits to the company location” when none of that had happened.
Villman-Bencosme also had one of her cohorts phone into an e-diary system to report fake personal experiences with the drug using PIN numbers that made the calls appear to be coming from the kids.
After she pleaded guilty in January 2021, Villman-Bencosme was sentenced to 63 months in prison and $455,214.12 restitution. That restitution punishment is shared with Unlimited co-owner Lisett Raventos and Maytee Lledo, the receptionist at Villman-Bencosme’s private practice. Reventos got 30 months and Lledo 14 months for conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Villman-Bencosme was originally supposed to start serving her sentence Dec. 3, 2021, but prosecutors asked that her date be moved back to make her “more readily available for trial prepareation and attendance at trial” for Unlimited study coordinator Jessica Palacio. Palacio is charged with making false statements and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
That trial is still in progress.
