Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has corrected an article by a prize-winning chemist following a report by Retraction Watch his threat to sue a fellow scientist who had submitted a letter to the journal critiquing the paper.
Chad Mirkin, director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University in Chicago, received one quarter of this year’s Kavli Prize in nanoscience for his work on spherical nucleic acids (SNAs), the topic of the PNAS article.
As we reported last month, a lawyer representing Mirkin sent a cease and desist letter to Raphaël Lévy, a professor of physics at the Université Paris Sorbonne Nord, accusing Lévy of making “patently false and defamatory” statements about Mirkin’s research in a letter Lévy had submitted to PNAS about the now-corrected article.
In his letter, Lévy wrote that the article’s “presentation of SNAs as a ‘powerful class of nanotherapeutics’ is misleading.”
The PNAS paper,“Multimodal neuro-nanotechnology: Challenging the existing paradigm in glioblastoma therapy,” had mentioned a clinical trial of an experimental cancer drug from Exicure, a company Mirkin co-founded in 2011 to develop SNAs for diagnosing and treating disease.
The experimental drug showed a “33% overall response rate at the highest dosage,” according to the PNAS paper. In his critique, Lévy wrote:
No reference is provided but the figure appears to come from an interim report presented by the company (press release and presentation at a conference (10)). The 33% are in fact 2 patients from a sub-group of 6 patients.
The correction to the article adds four references regarding the drug and its performance in clinical trials, one of which was reference 10 from Lévy’s letter. The other added references include the clinical trial registration and company press release about the results, both of which Lévy referred to in his letter, and a publication about a phase 1 study of the drug. The references were added “upon request,” according to the correction.
PNAS declined to publish Lévy’s letter, and declined to comment on its decision for our prior article. The journal said it had nothing to add to the correction. Mirkin has not responded to our requests for comment.
The added references confirm what Lévy wrote in his letter, he told Retraction Watch, but don’t go far enough to fix the article, in his view.
Readers will “be unaware that this correction results from my comment, which Chad Mirkin tried to silence with a legal threat, and that PNAS decided not to publish,” Lévy said. “They will also not know that the results are from an interim report of a clinical trial that stopped several years ago.”
“Thus this correction does nothing to correct the main problem” of the article, Lévy said, namely “that it cherry picks facts (here encouraging results from a very small number of patients) to mislead readers by presenting spherical nucleic acids as a ‘powerful class of nanotherapeutics.’”
Lévy also informed PNAS Mirkin had founded a new company, Flashpoint Therapeutics, to develop SNA drugs but had not disclosed this relationship in the paper. “That conflict of interest is still undeclared,” he said.
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Northwestern University is in Evanston, IL, north of Chicago. While some of its schools (e.g., the Feinberg School of Medicine) are physically located in downtown Chicago, the University is in Evanston. Specifically, its International Institute for Nanotechnology lists its location and physical address in Evanston: https://www.iinano.org/facilities/
The interest of journal editors in publishing high profile papers and their lack of interest in publishing letters to the editors pointing out errors is a longstanding problem. Publishing the critique and the author’s response was once an expected practice in scholarly publications. Granted not every critique warranted publication, and editors might decline axe grinding, verbose, unclear, or repetitive comment letters. Is PubPeer the only durable alternative for all the Raphael Levy’s out there?