Faked heart papers retracted following Ohio State investigation

A physiology journal has retracted two papers after an institutional investigation found a heart researcher falsified data and figures in the articles.

A committee at the Ohio State University found Govindasamy Ilangovan, an associate professor of cardiovascular medicine at the school, falsified figures and reused data, according to the retraction notices published in Heart and Circulatory Physiology, a journal of the American Physiological Society. 

The two papers, “Heat shock protects cardiac cells from doxorubicin-induced toxicity by activating p38 MAPK and phosphorylation of small heat shock protein 27,” and “HSP27 regulates p53 transcriptional activity in doxorubicin-treated fibroblasts and cardiac H9c2 cells: p21 upregulation and G2/M phase cell cycle arrest,” first appeared nearly 20 years ago. They have received 132 citations in total, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The notices detail how Ilangovan repurposed and relabelled Western blots from both published and unpublished works. One of the figures also was “inaccurate” due to “addition of false bands” in a Western blot, but the notice did not explicitly attribute the problems with the figure to Ilangovan.

Anonymous commenters posted their concerns on PubPeer about Western blot bands in both papers. Elisabeth Bik built on one such comment by pointing out “identical” and “remarkably similar” lanes of in multiple Western blot figures.

One of the papers received a corrigendum in 2021 over a figure “published incorrectly” in the original paper. The investigation found that Ilangovan falsified the updated figure in the corrigendum, and the original “was inaccurate because of the reuse and relabeling” of a Western blot. Ilangovan did not respond to our request for comment. 

Ohio State requested the two retractions, Chris Booker, the university’s director of media and public relations, told Retraction Watch. A spokesperson for the journal declined to comment on the retractions due to “confidentiality policies and privacy considerations.”

The university has also requested the retraction of one additional article and is waiting for the journal to respond, Booker told Retraction Watch, but did not specify which article. The only other article of Ilangovan’s with comments on PubPeer is “Heat shock factor-1 knockout enhances cholesterol 7α-hydroxylase (CYP7A1) and multidrug transporter (MDR1) gene expressions to attenuate atherosclerosis” in Cardiovascular Research. 

“The research misconduct process at Ohio State includes concurrence by university officials and an appeal by the respondent. We cannot comment further until the process is complete,” he said.

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