A prominent cancer research lab is up to three retractions and six corrections for “highly similar” images in papers published between 2018 and 2022.
The lab is led by Kounosuke Watabe at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Watabe holds one of three Wake Forest professorships all funded by a $2.8 million donation for cancer research in 2016.
Each of the retractions and corrections came after sleuth Kevin Patrick raised concerns about the articles on PubPeer in May 2024. Patrick, who identified instances of images in Watabe lab papers being “more similar than expected,” told Retraction Watch he wasn’t confident whether the image duplication could be attributed to misconduct. “I am never sure which is worse, misconduct or a pattern of errors. Neither seem to inspire confidence in the published results,” he said.
Watabe did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Mark Anderson, the assistant vice president of strategic communications at Wake Forest, also did not respond to our requests for comment via phone and email, nor did the general media contact listed online. Patrick told us he reached out to the university when he identified the image issues and never heard back.
The first retracted paper, on chronic nicotine exposure and metastatic lung cancer, was published in Oncogene in 2022. The authors retracted it in January for “highly similar ex vivo brain images,” which the authors said was a result of “mismanaged” data, according to the notice. The article has been cited 65 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
In a May 2024 PubPeer comment, Patrick, who uses the pseudonym “Actinopolyspora biskrensis,” had also questioned one of the paper’s citations. The work cited a paper that “was peer reviewed, accepted, and published in 5 days” from Journal of Cancer Science and Research, a journal “commonly believed” to be published by a predatory publisher. The journal appeared on Beall’s list, a controversial catalog of suspect publishers that went dark in 2017, and is not indexed in the Web of Science.
The same authors agreed to retract a 2021 paper in Nature Communications suggesting nicotine promotes the spread of breast cancer. That article has been cited 180 times. The May 2025 notice also cited mismanaged data and similar images in the work.
A spokesperson for Nature Communications confirmed the journal investigated the paper after being alerted to PubPeer comments. When we asked what the notice meant by “errors in data handling,” the spokesperson told us the question was “best answered by the authors.”
The group also lost a third paper in May, this one in Breast Cancer Research, for “highly similar images.” All the authors who responded to the journal disagreed with the retraction, although they admitted the images were “incorrect,” the notice states. The article, published in 2021, has been cited 29 times.
Patrick pointed out on PubPeer last year that one of the figures in that paper “seems to have been published” by the same authors in an earlier paper “where it is described differently.”
A representative from Springer Nature, which publishes the three journals, told us each of the retractions was initiated after journals became aware of concerns on PubPeer and that they didn’t plan to investigate any other papers by the same researchers.
The spokesperson also told us two of the Oncogene corrections were spurred by PubPeer, while the authors requested a correction on the third.
Five of the six corrections on papers coauthored by Watabe were also for image duplication. In the remaining article, a 2019 Oncogene paper, the authors “inadvertently omitted” dividing lines in blots and “incorrectly stated” the source of a cell line, according to the notice.
Hui-Wen Lo, the corresponding author of that paper and two others, responded to the concerns raised on PubPeer. In response to questions on a different Oncogene paper that received a correction for reusing an image from a previous publication, the corresponding author called the duplication an “an oversight on our part” and an “honest mistake.”
And Watabe responded on PubPeer to a post from Patrick pointing out a 2019 eBioMedicine paper contained images that “overlap, but are described as representing different treatment groups.” Watabe replied that the images were “inadvertently switched.” He said the authors requested a correction to the article. However, Patrick later commented the images had been completely replaced in the correction, and asked Watabe to clarify. Watabe did not respond.
In addition to the 2016 donation that established Watabe’s professorship, all of the studies were funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, according to the research funding statements on the papers.
One of the corrected papers published in Cancer Research was also funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.
When we asked how the journal was alerted to issues with the papers and whether they would look into other papers by the Watabe lab, Christine Battle, vice president and publisher at the American Association for Cancer Research, which publishes the journal, said “We don’t comment on specific cases.”
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].