Exclusive: Kavli prize winner threatens to sue critic for defamation

One of the winners of the 2024 Kavli Prize in nanoscience has threatened to sue a longtime critic, Retraction Watch has learned. 

In a cease and desist letter, a lawyer representing Chad Mirkin, a chemist and director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University in Chicago, accused Raphaël Lévy, a professor of physics at the Université Paris Sorbonne Nord, of making “patently false and defamatory” statements about Mirkin’s research.

The demand primarily concerns a letter to the editor Lévy submitted in April to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences regarding an article Mirkin co-authored, “Multimodal neuro-nanotechnology: Challenging the existing paradigm in glioblastoma therapy,” which appeared in the journal in February. 

Lévy and Mirkin, who was awarded one quarter of this year’s Kavli Prize in nanoscience for his work on spherical nucleic acids (SNAs), have a long history. In 2018, they clashed at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, where Mirkin called Lévy a “scientific terrorist.” Lévy has begun an effort to replicate one of Mirkin’s significant papers as part of the NanoBubbles project, which “focuses on how, when and why science fails to correct itself,” according to its website. 

In Lévy’s letter to PNAS, which the journal declined to publish, he wrote Mirkin’s article’s “presentation of SNAs as a ‘powerful class of nanotherapeutics’ is misleading.” 

The PNAS article 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, claiming the treatment showed a “33% overall response rate at the highest dosage,” Lévy wrote. He continued: 

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 clinical trial was stopped for administrative reasons, Lévy noted. Exicure announced in late 2021 it would wind down the trial. At the same time, the company disclosed the results of an internal investigation that found Grant Corbett, the former leader of its neuroscience group, had “misreported” preclinical efficacy data about another experimental drug in public presentations and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

According to its most recent disclosure, Exicure “has historically been an early-stage biotechnology company” but is now “exploring strategic alternatives” after restructuring and suspending its clinical and development work. 

Lévy’s letter concluded: 

Public and private funders of scientific research in academia and start-up companies have to make choices about which biomedical technologies or innovative therapies they sponsor. The scientific literature plays a critical role in informing those decisions and must therefore be balanced and accurate.

One month after Lévy submitted his letter to PNAS, he received an email from Mirkin, seen by Retraction Watch, accusing him of making “factually false and damaging” statements. 

“You will be hearing from my lawyer next week regarding the defamation and the serious legal consequences for it,” Mirkin wrote. 

The cease and desist letter followed on May 15. Lévy’s communications with PNAS, “falsely disparage [Mirkin] and charge him with having a lack of integrity in his profession as a research scientist,” Mirkin’s lawyer wrote. The letter continued: 

We are putting you on notice that in the event you do not retract the false statements made to PNAS and cease to disseminate further false statements of and concerning Dr. Mirkin to any third parties or the public generally, Dr. Mirkin will take all appropriate action to obtain relief against you for resulting injuries to his good name and reputation.

But the “patently false and defamatory” statement the letter attributes to Lévy does not appear in his letter in PNAS, and he said he did not write those words. Here’s the quotation from the cease and desist letter:

The published article [authored by Mirkin and others] includes uncited data that is misleading due to its small number of participants and the fact that the clinical trial (NCT03684785) was discontinued due of (sic.) a fraud case which found Mirkin’s previous company (Exicure) liable.

Neither Mirkin nor his lawyer, Phillip J. Zisook of the Chicago firm Schoenberg Finkel Beederman Bell Glazer, has responded to our queries about the source of the quotation. 

The letter also accuses Lévy of wanting “to cause injury to Mirkin’s professional reputation through fabricating and disseminating false statements.” Zisook wrote: 

Because your false statements disparage Dr. Mirkin in his professional capacity as a research scientist, they will be found to support actions for defamation per se and false light invasion of privacy in a lawsuit against you. 

The letter is “quite astonishing,” Lévy said, containing false assertions and posing “an extremely serious attack on my academic freedom and on academic freedom in general.” 

Zisook’s letter mentions a research misconduct investigation into Lévy at the University of Liverpool, where he worked until 2020, when he left voluntarily for his current position. The investigation – into allegations Lévy downloaded papers from Sci-Hub and harassed other scientists – was closed after the initial assessment for “insufficient grounds to pursue the complaint,” he said. 

Likewise, the letter alludes to complaints against Lévy at his current institution. These were retaliatory complaints after he reported a case of scientific misconduct, Lévy said. We’ve covered that case, which has resulted in three retractions so far. The investigations against Lévy have concluded without charges, he said. 

In response to the letter, Lévy sent Zisook and Mirkin a copy of his submission to PNAS and asked them to withdraw the cease and desist demand, as the quoted sentences “were very different from what I wrote.” It’s unclear where the passage came from. He also wrote: 

​​In my opinion, the correct way to determine whether this letter should be published or not by PNAS is through editorial evaluation including eventually peer review. Most people would certainly agree that legal threats should not interfere with that process…

Zisook refused to withdraw the cease and desist demand. He wrote:  

It was not just premised upon a particular statement in the article you recently forwarded to me but rather a persistent campaign to selectively use information and misrepresentations to actively defame Dr. Mirkin, including your recent communications with PNAS which clearly left them with the false impressions described in our Cease and Desist Letter.

PNAS rejected Lévy’s letter on June 17. A representative for the journal declined to comment on the decision, “due to the confidential nature of the peer review process.”

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