Study by deceased award-winning cancer researcher retracted because some patients were “invented”

A 2002 paper has been retracted by Cancer after some of the authors notified the journal that they hadn’t agreed to submit it — and an investigation found that a number of the patients described had been made up.

Here’s the notice for “Radioimmunotherapy of small-volume disease of metastatic colorectal cancer: results of a phase II trial with the iodine-131–labeled humanized anti–carcinoembryonic antigen antibody hMN-14:”

The above article, published online on February 12, 2002, in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement amongst the authors, the journal Editor-in-Chief, Fadlo R. Khuri, Wiley Periodicals, Inc., and the American Cancer Society.

The article was submitted for publication by the corresponding author, Thomas M. Behr, on the assumption that all co-authors had agreed to the submission. However, the journal was informed on February 2, 2015, that 4 co-authors on the paper had not consented to the submission and subsequent publication of this manuscript. Furthermore, an external evaluation commissioned by one of the co-authors of the study protocol, patient follow-up, and study results published in the manuscript has led to the conclusion that 6 of the 30 patients were invented and that follow-up studies in 10 of the 30 patients were not performed or contradict patient data published in the manuscript.

Based on these findings and at the request of the co-authors who did not consent to publication, the Publisher has agreed to retract this manuscript.

Behr, who won a number of prestigious awards, died in 2010. The two co-authors named Becker are also deceased. The paper, which tested a form of radioimmunotherapy in small colorectal tumors, has been cited 77 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

The journal tells us that the authorship concerns date back to 2005, when a previous paper by many of the same authors (and Behr as first author), “High-dose myeloablative radioimmunotherapy of mantle cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma with the iodine-131-labeled chimeric anti-CD20 antibody C2B8 and autologous stem cell support: results of a pilot study,” was also retracted because some of the co-authors were not on board:

The article cited above was submitted for publication in the journal Cancer by the corresponding author, Thomas M. Behr, on the assumption that all co-authors had agreed to the submission.

However, not all co-authors had consented to the submission and subsequent publication of this manuscript. The corresponding author wishes to convey his sincere regrets to the editor and readers of Cancer.

The Publisher has agreed to retract this manuscript.

According to the journal:

We hoped we had settled the matter with the first retraction. Then in 2012, one of the co-authors reached out to us to ask for copies of the Authorship Responsibility, Financial Disclosure, and Copyright Transfer Agreements for the second paper so they could assess the authenticity of the signatures. We provided what we had, and I believe they were conducting their investigation during the time between then and when they contacted us again in February 2015 to request the retraction.

The four co-authors who said they had neither seen nor signed the 2002 paper were Brittinger, Gratz, Griesinger, and Markus.

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