Category: cancer biology

Head of major diagnostic lab in Canada steps down amid investigation

AJPA_v185_i7_COVER.inddA prominent endocrinologist pathologist has resigned from running the largest hospital diagnostic laboratory in Canada following an investigation that has uncovered evidence of falsified data in two papers, Retraction Watch has learned.

Sylvia Asa was the Program Medical Director of the Laboratory Medicine Program at the University Health Network, affiliated with the University of Toronto, until this past spring when she stepped down, according to UHN spokesperson Gillian Howard:

Continue reading Head of major diagnostic lab in Canada steps down amid investigation

Gynecologic cancer researcher up to 13 retractions

13277Noriyuki Takai, a gynecologic cancer researcher at Oita University in Japan, has lost another five papers. With a new total of 13, that means he’s now on our leaderboard.

Three of the retractions are from the journal Tumor Biology, one is from the International Journal of Gynecological Cancer, and one from Anticancer Research.

Takai is the first author on all 5 papers.

As has been the case with Takai’s retractions, and there’s evidence that all were felled by issues with figures. In all, according to the retraction notices, “original data were processed inappropriately.” Four end with the following sentence (or some close variation thereof):

Continue reading Gynecologic cancer researcher up to 13 retractions

Gut paper retracted after university review says “figures cannot be validated by original data”

IBDA biologist at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Ohio has retracted a paper from Inflammatory Bowel Diseases after a university review found the figures within it could not be “validated by original data.”

The 2010 paper, “Elevated IL-13Rα2 in intestinal epithelial cells from ulcerative colitis or colorectal cancer initiates MAPK pathway,” concerns the elevated expression and role of an inflammatory protein in colon cancer cells.

According to the notice, corresponding author and biologist Alan Levine — who recently received a $3.9 million Avant-Garde Award for HIV/AIDS Research from the National Institute on Drug Abuse — requested the retraction.

Here’s the full notice: Continue reading Gut paper retracted after university review says “figures cannot be validated by original data”

JCI issues mega-correction for multiple myeloma paper

125-7-coverThe Journal of Clinical Investigation has issued a lengthy correction to a paper about the role of the immune system in the progression and treatment response of multiple myeloma.

The correction changes details from the name of an author to figure legends, and adds entire supplemental figures.

Shortly after the paper’s publication on April 20th, commenters on PubPeer pointed out duplications in multiple figure panels.

Last month, the journal issued an extensive correction note for “Immunosurveillance and therapy of multiple myeloma are CD226 dependent,” which, in part, tries to explain the multiple duplications.

It starts out noting a typo:

Continue reading JCI issues mega-correction for multiple myeloma paper

Cancer Research retraction is fifth for Robert Weinberg; fourth for his former student

13.coverAnother domino has fallen in a chain of retractions for Robert Weinberg, the man who discovered the first tumor-causing gene in humans, along with the first tumor suppressor gene: Cancer Research just retracted a paper of his on some of the molecular steps to metastasis.

The paper, “Concurrent Suppression of Integrin α5, Radixin, and RhoA Phenocopies the Effects of miR-31 on Metastasis,” has been cited 70 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. As we have noted before, Weinberg’s papers are frequently highly cited. His bio at the Whitehead Institute bills him as “a pioneer in cancer research.”

Four of Weinberg’s retracted papers — including this latest — share a first author: Scott Valastyan, once a very promising grad student in Weinberg’s lab. 

This retraction, like Valastyan’s others, is linked to his retracted 2009 Cell paper. (That paper was cited 482 times, and there’s even a video from the Cell press office to go with it). Continue reading Cancer Research retraction is fifth for Robert Weinberg; fourth for his former student

Another author withdrawal from JBC earns another opaque notice

Journal of Biological Chemistry1The authors of a 2014 study on the biochemical changes that can encourage the progression of cancer have withdrawn the paper from the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

The post from the JBC – which we’ve noted are rarely helpful – doesn’t provide any details or reason for the withdrawal. As usual, this is all we got:

Continue reading Another author withdrawal from JBC earns another opaque notice

JBC cancer paper felled by duplication is one author’s second retraction this month

25.coverA 2002 paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry on how lung cancer cells resist death has been retracted for duplicating figures from a 2001 paper.

The retracted paper, “Fibroblast growth factor-2 induces translational regulation of Bcl-XL and Bcl-2 via a MEK-dependent pathway: correlation with resistance to etoposide-induced apoptosis,” shares the first and last authors with the 2001 paper, in Oncogene, as well as two other co-authors.

Here’s JBC’s entire retraction note, a sub-genre with which we’ve become intimately familiar by now:

Continue reading JBC cancer paper felled by duplication is one author’s second retraction this month

Oncogene to retract breast cancer paper following years-old misconduct investigation

Oncogene is retracting a 2010 paper on the molecular details of breast cancer cells as they undergo metastasis following an investigation that discovered the first author had committed misconduct.

The thing is, the investigation concluded in 2012, and the paper — “miR-661 expression in SNAI1-induced epithelial to mesenchymal transition contributes to breast cancer cell invasion by targeting Nectin-1 and StarD10 messengers” — isn’t being retracted until next week.

According to Lucinda Haines, senior publishing manager at Nature Publishing Group, the paper will be retracted June 29.

We heard from Iris Behrmann, Head of the Life Sciences Research Unit at the University of Luxembourg:

Continue reading Oncogene to retract breast cancer paper following years-old misconduct investigation

Inability to reproduce Dutch grad student’s data prompts two retractions from the cancer lit

We are watching an intriguing case out of the Netherlands, involving a young researcher whose dubious results have led to the retraction of a pair of papers.

The retracted articles, which appeared in 2008 in Cancer Research and the British Journal of Cancer, come from the lab of the prominent Dutch scientist Ed Roos, of the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam. Both papers addressed the actions of certain chemokine receptors — molecules on cell surfaces that interact with blood proteins involved in the immune response — on the behavior of tumor cells.

The first author on each paper was Joost Meijer, at the time a graduate student in Roos’ shop.

The retraction notices contain essentially the same information, although in the case of the BJC article — “Effect of the chemokine receptor CXCR7 on proliferation of carcinoma cells in vitro and in vivo” — the letter is quite personal. Dated Jan. 4, 2011, it reads: Continue reading Inability to reproduce Dutch grad student’s data prompts two retractions from the cancer lit

Update on stem cell-cancer link retraction: Why not everyone signed, and why authors ended up in another journal first

Last month, we wrote about the retraction of a 2005 paper suggesting that some adult stem cells might give rise to cancer. That, of course, would be a problem if researchers tried treating heart disease and other conditions with them. The paper’s authors retracted it, however, when it became clear that instead of being transformed — that’s the scientific word for “became cancerous” — the cells had simply become contaminated and overgrown with tumor cells used in research.

We had some questions for the authors of the original paper, and for the editor of the journal. Last week, we heard back from one of the paper’s authors, Javier Garcia-Castro, who had been on vacation without Internet access for weeks. In an email to Retraction Watch, Garcia-Castro wrote: Continue reading Update on stem cell-cancer link retraction: Why not everyone signed, and why authors ended up in another journal first