Former Harvard researchers lose PNAS paper for reusing data

A group of cancer researchers once all based at Harvard have earned a retraction after acknowledging data duplication “errors” in an article published more than eight years ago. 

The paper, “Synthetic lethality of combined glutaminase and Hsp90 inhibition in mTORC1-driven tumor cells,” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in December 2014. It has been cited 52 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The study informed a clinical trial from Infinity Pharmaceuticals on a drug for people with lung cancer, according to Dimensions, a scientific research database. 

Starting in November 2020, the paper drew scrutiny from commenters on PubPeer. The posts include claims of duplications in several of the paper’s figures; none of the authors has responded to the 10 comments on the site. 

Pseudonymous critic Claire Francis drew attention to these concerns in a November 2020 email to editors at PNAS, as well as academic and legal representatives from Harvard, Cornell, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. That email received no response. 

On January 6 this year, PNAS published the following retraction notice for the paper: 

The undersigned authors note, “We are retracting this article due to the following errors in the preparation of several of the published figures. The same data appear to be presented in the +Rapa/+17AAG/48h panel of Fig. 2A and in the BPTES + 17AAG + NAC (72h) panel of Fig. 5D. In the p62 panels of Fig. 3D and SI Appendix, Fig. S2, the same data appear to be presented in lanes 1 and 5 of Fig. 3D and lanes 1 and 2 of SI Appendix, Fig. S2; in lane 6 of Fig. 3D and lane 3 of SI Appendix, Fig. S2; and in lane 7 of Fig. 3D and lane 4 of SI Appendix, Fig. S2. The same data appear to be presented in lanes 1 to 12 of the α-Tubulin panel of SI Appendix, Fig. S3B and the full GAPDH panel of SI Appendix, Fig. S4A. In the Cleaved PARP of SI Appendix, Fig. S4A, the same data appear to be presented in lanes 4 and 12; and in lanes 7 and 8. In SI Appendix, Fig. S5A, the same data appear to be presented in lanes 8 and 11 of the Cleaved PARP panel. Also in SI Appendix, Fig. S5A, the same data appear to be presented in lanes 5 and 8 of the P-elF2α panel. We sincerely regret any inconvenience to the scientific community this may have caused.”

Jing Li, Gregory R. Hoffman, Jane J. Yu, and John Blenis

Corresponding author John Blenis, now at Weill Cornell Medicine, did not respond to our requests for comment. Nor did May Berenbaum, the editor-in-chief at PNAS. 

PNAS issued a correction last August for another paper, from 2002, on which Blenis was the corresponding author, saying that it had omitted data. The authors wrote that the removal of the data “in no way compromises the conclusions of the paper.”

A spokesperson for PNAS wrote in an email: 

Thank you for your message. We have nothing further to add to the published statement.

The 2014 article was funded in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health to Blenis as PI that totaled more than $1.1 million. 

We asked Nahum Sonenburg, guest editor of the retracted paper and a biochemist at McGill University, for his take on what happened. He said he was too busy to re-read the paper closely  but said it was “unfortunate” it was retracted. 

When we asked whether any duplicated data were flagged in his initial edit of the paper, he wrote in an email: 

I am almost sure that the issue did not come up, as I would have absolutely remembered it, because it is extremely troublesome, and would have precluded the publication.

This is not the first time a paper by Blenis has been marred by data duplication. In 2021, Cell issued a correction for a 2005 paper of which Blenis is the corresponding author. The paper was found to have a duplication in the results that did “not compromise the conclusions of the paper.”

Duplicated and omitted data in a 2003 article in Current Biology on which Blenis was a co-author received a correction last February. Again, editors wrote that “overall conclusions derived from this experiment are not affected.”

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