Category: biomaterials

Work by group at Australian university faces scrutiny

A journal is investigating research by a group in Australia, after receiving “serious allegations” regarding a 2017 paper about treating eye burns.

The journal, Frontiers in Pharmacology, has issued an expression of concern (EOC) for the 2017 paper while it investigates. The notice does not specify the nature of the allegations.  Meanwhile, several other papers by the three researchers, based at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia, have also come under scrutiny. Late last month, Frontiers in Pharmacology retracted a 2015 paper by Kislay Roy, Rupinder Kanwar, and Jagat R Kanwar, citing image duplication. A 2015 paper in Biomaterials received a correction in May 2017, again flagging image duplication.

Roy, the first author on the papers, is a postdoctoral research fellow; Rupinder Kanwar, a middle author, is a senior lecturer; and Jagat R Kanwar, the corresponding author on all three, is head of the Nanomedicine-Laboratory of Immunology and Molecular Biomedical Research.

Gearóid Ó Faoleán, the ethics and integrity manager at Frontiers in Pharmacology, explained that the investigation into the flagged article is ongoing and the EOC “must serve as the extent of our public statement for the present.”

A spokesperson for Deakin University declined to comment on the allegations: Continue reading Work by group at Australian university faces scrutiny

Pulp fiction: doubtful “veracity” leads to retraction of endodontics paper

This one’s like taking candy from a baby.

The Journal of Endodontics — or JOE — has retracted a 2011 article (its online date) on the prospects of tissue engineering for the mouth by a group of Chinese authors who appear to have tried to pass bogus data into print.

The paper was titled “Mineralized Tissue Formation by Bone Morphogenetic Protein-7–transfected Pulp Stem Cells“. According to the notice: Continue reading Pulp fiction: doubtful “veracity” leads to retraction of endodontics paper

Controversial paper on life-extending buckyballs corrected after blog readers note problems

Back in April, a group of French and Tunisian researchers published a paper in Biomaterials which came to the astonishing conclusion that buckyballs (carbon tetrachloride) coated in olive oil could dramatically extend the lives of lab rodents. That news was picked up by Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline blog, on which he expressed some bemusement about the work but ultimately praised it:

These are reasonable (but unproven) hypotheses, and I very much look forward to seeing this work followed up to see some more light shed on them. The whole life-extension result needs to be confirmed as well, and in other species. I congratulate the authors of this work, though, for giving me the most number of raised eyebrows I’ve had while reading a scientific paper in quite some time.

One of those eyebrows dropped a bit the following day, when Lowe reported that readers had pointed him to a clear case of image duplication in the article. At the time, Lowe concluded: Continue reading Controversial paper on life-extending buckyballs corrected after blog readers note problems