Anil Potti, who resigned from his post at Duke today during an investigation into faked results, will likely have another retraction to his credit shortly. According to a Duke statement:
Dr. Potti’s collaborator, Joseph Nevins, Ph.D., has initiated a process intended to lead to a retraction request regarding a paper previously published in Nature Medicine. This process has been initiated due to concerns about the reproducibility of reported predictors, and their possible effect on the overall conclusions in this paper. Other papers published based on this science are currently being reviewed for any concerns.
The three clinical trials based on this science for which new enrollment was suspended in mid-July, have been closed.
The development was first reported this afternoon by blogs at Nature and Science.
The paper, “Genomic signatures to guide the use of chemotherapeutics,” was published in October 2006 and has already been the subject of two corrections — one in November 2007 and another in August 2008. It has been cited an impressive 252 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
As an academic scientist, and as someone with a beloved immediate family member who is fighting cancer, I am enraged at this shameful, reckless disregard for people who are literally fighting for their lives. I hope that criminal charges are brought against Anil Potti, and I hope he has time to think about what he’s done – in prison.