Nature has retracted a paper after an investigation at a U.K. institution found the first author — then a doctoral student — manipulated data.
The paper, which looked at the sensitivity of lung cancers to immunotherapy, appeared in April 2023 and has been cited 192 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
The retraction notice published today states first author Kevin Ng was responsible for the manipulation in the paper, including manipulated data in several figures. At the time of the experiments, Ng was a Ph.D. student at the Francis Crick Institute in London under the supervision of co-corresponding author George Kassiotis.
According to Ng’s OrcID profile, he is now a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University in New York. We were unable to find a current email address for him, and he did not respond to a message sent via Instagram.
The Francis Crick Institute’s integrity team “was made aware of concerns” regarding the study after it was published, according to a statement sent to us by Kathryn Ingham, research communications and public affairs lead for the organization. Ingham declined to comment on the origins of the concerns. The corresponding authors on the article — Kassiotis, Charles Swanton, and Julian Downward, all affiliated with the Crick Institute — agreed with the retraction, according to the statement, which is now published online.
The investigation found “no evidence of malpractice by other authors,” according to the Crick statement. The corresponding authors did not respond to our question on how the manipulation went unnoticed by the other 48 authors on the paper, and forwarded our request to Ingham.
According to the Crick report, Ng manipulated cell binding data in one of the figures, and experiments relating to three other figures couldn’t be verified. The manipulated data supported the paper’s main conclusion, according to the report, and the institute recommended the paper be retracted.
The Crick Institute notified the journal about its findings and on November 21, Nature added an editor’s note to the article alerting readers to data reliability concerns.
Co-corresponding author Julian Downward, associate research director at the Crick Institute, has 27 papers with comments on PubPeer, many of which were flagged for image concerns. In 2015, Downward lost two papers in one month for data issues, including one from Nature, as we reported at the time.
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