Retraction Watch

Exclusive: A couple paid more than $800,000 for a gene-editing therapy for their daughter. She died, and it wasn’t made public

An investigation by Science and Retraction Watch has uncovered details about a clinical trial that resulted in the death of its sole patient: a 6-year-old girl with a rare genetic mutation affecting her cognitive development. Her death has never been reported publicly, even though the medical team published its preclinical work in Nature earlier this year. Also omitted from the paper and trial records: The family paid more than $800,000 to fund the therapy’s development. The family has asked the authors to withdraw the paper, and experts we spoke to raised issues they say may warrant a retraction. The beginning of the story, by Retraction Watch contributing writer Brendan Borrell, is below, lightly edited for brevity. Read the full story at Science.

The 6-year-old girl tugged on her mother’s hand as they pressed through the doors of the hospital in Shanghai. Behind them, her father rolled a large suitcase with everything the child needed for the weeklong stay. She told her parents it felt like they were going on vacation. In fact, they brought her here for an experimental gene therapy.

The girl was slipping behind her peers in kindergarten. She still spoke in simple sentences and ate with training chopsticks. Underneath it all was a single mutated DNA base, a T that should have been a C.

“Your ‘book’ has a small mistake, which has caused you to have a disease that affects your growth,” read the children’s version of the informed consent form from the hospital. “Over time, it can get more serious.”

Doctors hoped to repair that mistake while her brain was still building itself. It would be a clinical trial of one, funded in part by $860,000 the parents had scraped together from their own savings and from relatives.

Journal retracts breast cancer paper 10 years after sleuth flagged issues

A biomedical journal has retracted a paper by a cancer researcher who sued her former institution over misconduct allegations. The action comes a decade after a sleuth first raised concerns about the article.

Former Ohio State researcher Flavia Pichiorri criticized how the publication, the Journal of Experimental Medicine, handled the dispute and said the journal suddenly pivoted away from its plan to republish the study with repeated experiments, a claim supported by correspondence seen by Retraction Watch.

In 2020, Ohio State University found Pichiorri, who worked in the lab of Carlo Croce, culpable for manipulating and reusing images in four publications, spanning from her time in Croce’s lab through establishing her own lab at Ohio State. Croce was cleared of direct misconduct, but OSU found serious management and oversight failures in his laboratory. Once a high-profile cancer researcher at Ohio State, Croce now has 18 retractions. He has filed several defamation lawsuits unsuccessfully, and reportedly owes his attorneys more than $1 million.

Exclusive: Medical student in Nepal behind busy research factory

A second-year medical student in Nepal is at the center of an international research network churning out everything from systematic reviews and meta-analyses to case reports and database studies, Retraction Watch has learned.

The student, Raghabendra Kumar Mahato, leverages this network, which includes nearly 1,000 members connected through the WhatsApp messaging platform, to produce large numbers of conference abstracts and journal papers at breakneck speed, according to posts and messages we have reviewed. The work has been presented or accepted for presentation at conferences organized by the American Heart Association (AHA), the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) and many other medical societies and has appeared in journals from major publishers.

But a review of dozens of WhatsApp messages we obtained and an interview with a disillusioned member of the community, called the “Global Clinical Research Consortium,” suggests the network produces fast-churn science, includes a known paper miller and treats authorship as a tradable commodity.

Publisher investigating peer reviewer for alleged bribery scheme

Earlier this year, Tushar Sen, an independent researcher based in New Delhi, submitted a manuscript to Security and Privacy about the modeling of polymorphic malware. On May 15, a purported reviewer for the journal wrote Sen indicating he received the article, but that it was not ready for publication.

“i may revise it with you but you should follow paid review for my efforts,” the email read. “i may finalise it in one week and i will recommend acceptance as a final decision.”

Sen, a cybersecurity researcher, believed the writer was attempting to extort money from him in exchange for recommending acceptance of his submission. He did not respond, but continued to receive more emails from the individual about the proposal. In a May 20 email, the person wrote they were “still awaiting” Sen’s response before “i submit rejection to the journal.” On May 23, the purported reviewer wrote, “I recommended the rejection decision” and “Gud (sic) luck.”

Weekend reads: Private info in ‘most’ arXiv preprints; why did George Church decline authorship; 28 misconduct cases in China

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

‘Disappointed’: Cochrane journal asked researchers to publish article, then retracted it for conflicts
A student claimed to have a Ph.D. in at least eight letters to journals. Two have been retracted
ORI sanction and news coverage prompts sleuthing, retraction
Sage retracts eight papers by former Radboud ‘rising star’ for compromised peer-review process
Now, 240: More than a decade later, journals are still retracting Joachim Boldt’s papers
Harvard cancer researchers earn retraction for image duplication

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 65,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up to 650, and our mass resignations list has more than 50 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts.

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Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Harvard cancer researchers earn retraction for image duplication

A group of researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston have lost a paper for image duplication following an investigation by the two institutions.

The paper, published in September 2019 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, described a treatment for tumors caused by a disorder called tuberous sclerosis complex. Several of the article’s 12 authors are affiliated with Brigham and Women’s Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine division. Corresponding author David Kwiatkowski is an oncologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

The research was partially funded by two grants from the U.S. Department of Defense and a National Institutes of Health grant, the latter of which was awarded to Kwiatkowski.

Now, 240: More than a decade later, journals are still retracting Joachim Boldt’s papers

Martin Tramèr was editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Anaesthesiology during what he once called in print “The Boldt debacle.”

The misconduct scandal involving hundreds of papers by Joachim Boldt broke to the surface in 2010, but journals continue to retract papers by the disgraced German anesthesiologist – and researchers have continued to cite the work.

Tramèr, who described the story as “sad,” said he was “surprised that, so long after the Boldt debacle, articles still are being retracted again, including eight from his former journal – articles he and his colleagues specifically exempted from retraction 15 years ago: “What has happened since then? Why were these additional articles retracted after all, albeit very late? It’s a mystery.”

Sage retracts eight papers by former Radboud ‘rising star’ for compromised peer-review process

The publisher Sage has retracted eight papers by a former “rising star” from a Dutch university for a “compromised” peer-review process at a journal he edited.

Last week, Retraction Watch obtained an email from an editor at Sage to the editorial board of Group & Organization Management, stating that, following a “thorough investigation,” the publisher would retract “a subset of articles” by the journal’s former editor-in-chief Yannick Griep. The retraction applies to eight of the 25 papers Griep coauthored in the journal, according to the July 14 retraction notice. The papers were retracted for a “compromised” peer-review process, the notice states.

“As the peer-review process was administered by the former Editor in Chief, who is also the co-author of the articles, the objectivity of the peer-review process has been compromised,” reads a publisher’s note published alongside the retractions. The move “relates to the underlying review process and no determination has been made regarding the scientific content of the articles.”

ORI sanction and news coverage prompts sleuthing, retraction

Four months after the Office of Research Integrity sanctioned a former postdoc for falsifying images in grant reports, a Science journal is retracting a paper by the researcher for image duplication.

After reading our story about the ORI’s findings, sleuth Paul S. Brookes took a look at the researcher’s ORCID profile and ran his papers through an AI tool that spots duplicate images.

Brookes’ analysis showed a 2019 paper in Science Signaling contained an image identical to an earlier study in Scientific Reports with the same first author — Chen-Yeh Ke, the former postdoctoral fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York who was sanctioned by ORI in March for falsifying images in an unpublished manuscript supported by federal funds and reporting the fabricated results in two research performance progress reports.

A student claimed to have a Ph.D. in at least eight letters to journals. Two have been retracted.

This past year, Zhihao Lei has signed his name to at least 35 letters to the editor of medical journals, weighing in on topics from ICU care to breast cancer. In eight of them, he identified himself as a Ph.D. at Cornell University, although he held only a bachelor’s degree at the time.

Two of those letters, one in JAMA Oncology and another in JAMA Pediatrics, were retracted last month after Lei himself acknowledged in the notices he had “falsely reported” his degree as a Ph.D. and implying he was an employee at the university when he was not. When he published the letters, he held a bachelor’s degree and was enrolled at Cornell as a master’s student in the School of Professional Studies. The retractions relate to Lei’s false credentials and not the content of the letters. In at least six others Lei published in the past year, he also signs off as a Ph.D., although none of these has been corrected or retracted.

Lei, who has served as a peer reviewer at Cancer Gene Therapy and the British Medical Journal, said he didn’t understand why Retraction Watch was interested in this case. “I am not entirely clear about the purpose of your inquiry,” he wrote in an email, adding that the retractions involved only author metadata and credentials, not fabrications, falsification or plagiarism.

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