A researcher and former faculty member at Tufts School of Medicine in Boston has been banned from working with animals for a year following repeated cases of abuse under his supervision, according to documents obtained by an animal-rights group.
In an Oct. 26, 2022, letter to the federal Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare, the university reported “serious and continuing noncompliance with” animal-welfare regulations. These breaches included “injections in mice via an unapproved route/location, failure to provide required analgesia, inadequate supportive care and monitoring, and failure to euthanize mice upon reaching the approved humane endpoints,” Tufts said.
When asked for his comments, the researcher “refuted most of the allegations and took no responsibility for his actions,” the university added.
An earlier letter from Tufts, dated May 16, 2022, described “a cage of mice containing one adult male with a litter of dead and moribund neonatal pups. Further investigation revealed the dam was misidentified as male and removed from the cage prematurely.”
The school has pulled the responsible researcher off the project he was overseeing, revoked his privilege to work as principal investigator on experiments involving animals and suspended him from doing animal research for one year, the university said in the letter.
The Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare was satisfied with Tufts’ handling of the case.
According to Tufts spokesperson Patrick Collins, the researcher, whose name is redacted from the documents obtained by Stop Animal Exploitation Now (SAEN), “was performing research for a company that contracted with the university to use its lab space.”
Collins told Retraction Watch:
The University takes this incident seriously and proactively reported it to the National Institutes of Health. The researcher in question is not and was not a Tufts University employee at the time, no longer performs research at Tufts, and is permanently prohibited from being a principal investigator at Tufts.
“IACUC number B2020-91,” which is referenced in the Tufts documents, appears in a patent application describing several mouse experiments conducted at Tufts. One of the inventors listed is Abdulraouf Ramadan, who is head of immunology at Lapix Therapeutics and was a research assistant professor at Tufts between 2017 and 2020, according to his now-deleted LinkedIn profile. The two other inventors are Anas Fathallah, Lapix’ co-founder and CEO, and Scott D. Larsen of the University of Michigan.
Ramadan’s name also appears on one of the emails obtained by SAEN, which includes an attachment titled “Tufts OLAW notification Ramadan 102622.pdf.”
We called Tufts and were told that Ramadan “is listed as a research assistant professor in the department of ophthalmology.” Ramadan did not reply to our requests for comment, but his LinkedIn profile was deleted shortly after we contacted him at the Tufts email we were provided.
In a letter to the United States Patent and Trademarking Office dated April 17, SAEN took issue with the patent application that we identified.
The application, filed by Lapix Therapeutics, repeatedly states that:
All animal studies were conducted under IACUC number B2020-91 and in compliance with Tufts University/Tufts Medical Center & Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging.
SAEN called this statement “patently untrue, and therefore fraudulent” given the violations that Tufts reported:
Therefore, since this patent filing is in fact both fraudulent, and connected to “serious and continuing noncompliance” with PHS policy and federal regulations, it must be revoked.
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