‘Reused over and over again:’ Image recycling leads to 5-year funding ban for cancer researcher

A former researcher at Boys Town National Research Hospital in Nebraska has agreed to a five-year ban from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) on receiving federal science funding after being found guilty of having fabricated data in numerous grant applications and articles. 

According to the ORI, Sudhakar Yakkanti, a Harvard-trained cancer specialist who from 2004 to 2012 held the post of Director of the Cell Signaling, Retinal & Tumor Angiogenesis Laboratory at Boys Town: 

intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsified and/or fabricated figures in the following eight (8) unfunded NIH grant applications, one (1) funded NIH grant application, seven (7) publications, and two (2) unpublished manuscripts 

Yakkanti, the ORI found, doctored his data in these and other ways: 

falsifying an image from an in vivo CNV experiment by falsely relabeling an image representing results from an experiment with the anti-angiogenic molecule hexastatin (α6NC1) to represent results from different CNV experiments with different anti-angiogenic molecules

falsifying and/or fabricating bar graphs in Figure 9B of grant application R01 CA166195-01, which was based on the falsified image in Figure 9A (right panel) of grant application R01 CA166195-01

falsifying microscope images of endothelial tube formation assays by reusing and falsely labeling one image as three different experiment

Yakkanti has held editorships at several journals, including the Journal of Bioanalysis  & Biomedicine and the Journal of Cancer Science and Therapy, both of which are OMICS titles. OMICS, as many Retraction Watch readers may recall, is largely viewed as predatory, and has been ordered to pay the U.S. government $50 million for “unfair and deceptive practices.”

‘So blatant’

A source familiar with the case against Yakkanti, which dates back many years, told us that 

It appeared that he a portfolio of images that he reused over and over again to represent different experiments throughout his publishing career. The images were so obviously just reused — sometimes cropped, sometimes rotated — that for the most part there wasn’t a great amount of forensic work needed.

Given the lack of subtlety, the source told us that peer reviewers — both at journals and particularly at funding agencies, could, and indeed should, have spotted Yakkanti’s misconduct long ago:

If you look at all the grants that were submitted, many cited other work, and cited work in which these images were recycled. I think it was so blatant that it could have been picked up.  

The ORI finding states that Yakkanti has agreed to instruct the relevant journals to retract, or in some cases, correct, his publications. Here’s the list: 

• Biochemistry 2000;39(42):12929-12938
• Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 2003;100(8):4766-4771
• The Journal of Clinical Investigation 2005;115(10):2801-2810
• Invest. Ophthalmol. Vis. Sci. 2009;50(10):4567-4575
• Pharmaceutical Research 2008;25(12):2731-2739
• Scientific Reports 2014;4(4136):1-9
• Current Eye Res. 2010 Jan;35(1):44-55

On some of the papers, Yakkanti appears as Akulapalli Sudhakar. Together, these papers have been cited more than 650 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, with 360 of those for the 2003 PNAS paper. So far, to our knowledge, none of these articles has been retracted or corrected.

Yakkanti, who left Boys Town for the Stanford Research Institute, now appears to be working as an associate vice president at United Scientific Group, a Texas-based outfit that puts on conferences and publishes journals. Kenneth Blum, who launched the non-profit organization, has not responded to a request for comment. 

According to Yakkanti’s LinkedIn page, his duties include: 

Provid[ing] support to draft journal & conference policies and scientific ethics to publish and organize national and international scientific conferences…

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