Anil Potti and his former Duke colleagues have retracted a sixth paper, this one in PLoS ONE.
According to the retraction notice for “An Integrated Approach to the Prediction of Chemotherapeutic Response in Patients with Breast Cancer,” the withdrawal was prompted by the retraction of a Nature Medicine paper that formed the basis of the PLoS ONE study’s approach: Continue reading Potti retraction tally grows to six with a withdrawal in PLoS ONE, and will likely end up near a dozen
From the “not terribly surprising” department: Eight patients — or their estates — who enrolled in clinical trials at Duke overseen by Anil Potti and colleagues have sued the university.
The 90-page lawsuit, which names Duke, Potti, Potti’s boss Joseph Nevins, CancerGuide Diagnostics (in which Potti and Nevins had an interest), among others, does a thorough job of documenting the case. In particular, it reviews the history of the trials, which were stopped in 2009, restarted, and then stopped for good as more and more issues came to light. It emphasizes, as you would expect, that Duke and the Potti team were warned repeatedly about problems in their work, notably by Keith Baggerly and a colleague.
Potti and colleagues have, as Retraction Watch readers will remember, now retracted five papers.
The plaintiff’s attorney, Thomas Henson, told Raleigh-Durham’s ABC11: Continue reading Duke sued over Potti case
We can only imagine how Joe Hollyfield felt to learn from us, of all people, that his journal, Experimental Eye Research, had retracted two manuscripts in a recent issue.
The papers, “Mechanisms of retinal ganglion cell injury and defense in glaucoma,” by Qu J, Wang D, and Grosskreutz CL, and “Mitochondria: Their role in ganglion cell death and survival in primary open angle glaucoma,” by Osborne, NN, carried the same retraction notices:
This article has been withdrawn at the request of the author(s) and/or editor. The Publisher apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause. The full Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal can be found at http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy.
Because in our experience such unhelpful wording often masks interesting details — read, author misconduct — we called Hollyfield for comment. He graciously walked us through the retractions, explaining the case in detail, until we realized that we were talking about different papers entirely. Hollyfield, it turned out, thought we were asking about the travails of Sangiliyandi Gurunathan, an eye researcher from India whom we’d previously covered and whose work recently had been retracted by Experimental Eye Research and other journals for image manipulation.
But Hollyfield was unaware of the two retractions we’d intended to talk about with him and told us he’d look into them.
Here’s what he learned: Continue reading Publisher error handling two eye papers leads to retractions, new policy on notices
Anil Potti, the former cancer researcher whose work has become the subject of intense scrutiny that has already led to the retraction of five papers, didn’t tell the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) about two very relevant corporate relationships he had when he published papers there, Retraction Watch has learned.
JAMA has published two papers by Potti and colleagues: 2008’s “Gene Expression Signatures, Clinicopathological Features, and Individualized Therapy in Breast Cancer,” and 2010’s “Age- and Sex-Specific Genomic Profiles in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer.”
The Cancer Letter, which has been way out front in the Potti case, first reported Potti’s relationships with Eli Lilly and CancerGuide Diagnostics (formerly Oncogenomics, Inc.). As The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper, reported last September, the two companies cut their ties with Potti in July 2010 after allegations of misconduct and lying about a Rhodes Scholarship came to light.
But that was after the two papers were published, and Potti had relationships with both since 2006. As The Chronicle notes, he was a director at CancerGuide Diagnostics (formerly Oncogenomics, Inc.), and Continue reading Anil Potti failed to disclose corporate ties in yet-to-be-retracted JAMA papers
The list of papers retracted by former Duke oncologist Anil Potti has grown to five. The notice, from Blood: Continue reading A fifth retraction for Anil Potti, this one in Blood
The authors of a 2008 paper alleging to have described how a particular protein binds to the parathyroid hormone have retracted it. The paper, “Structure of the Parathyroid Hormone Receptor C Terminus Bound to the G-Protein Dimer Gβ1
2,” has been cited 12 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. According to the notice: Continue reading Ties that don’t bind: Group retracts parathyroid hormone crystallography paper
One of the authors of a paper in Physical Review Letters has withdrawn it, after someone pointed out an error.
The paper, “Coulomb Forces on DNA Polymers in Charged Fluidic Nanoslits,” was written by Brown University’s Derek Stein and one of his graduate students, Yongqiang Ren. It was published in February of this year, and the retraction ran on July 20.
The notice is forthright: Continue reading A quick Physical Review Letters retraction after author realizes analysis was “performed incorrectly”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has found that a Boston University cancer researcher made up experiments reported in two papers funded by National Cancer Institute and National Institutes of Health grants. According to the ORI notice:
Sheng Wang, PhD, Boston University School of Medicine Cancer Research Center: Based on the Respondent’s acceptance of ORI’s research misconduct findings, ORI found that Dr. Sheng Wang, who has been an Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, Boston University School of Medicine Cancer Research Center (BUSM), engaged in research misconduct in research supported by National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH), grants R01 CA102940 and R01 CA101992.
The two papers were: Continue reading Two papers to be retracted after ORI finds misconduct by Boston University cancer researcher
Marc Hauser, the Harvard psychology professor who retracted a paper last year following a university investigation, has resigned his post. As the Boston Globe’s Carolyn Johnson, who broke the original Hauser retraction story, reports: Continue reading Marc Hauser resigns from Harvard
On Tuesday, we reported that Emory University in Atlanta was looking into why a team of former researchers — now at the University of Louisville — had retracted three papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC).
Today, we learned that the researchers’ home institution since 2009 is now investigating the work. A spokesperson tells Retraction Watch: Continue reading University of Louisville investigating work by team under review at Emory