A former cancer researcher has falsified data in 11 studies, according to the results of a investigation scheduled to be published in the Federal Register tomorrow.
The Office of Research Integrity’s findings are based on an inquiry at Virginia Commonwealth University, where Girija Dasmahapatra worked until July of this year, investigating possible therapies for cancer. The misconduct affected research funded by three grants from the National Institutes of Health. Steven Grant, a researcher at VCU, is the principal investigator on the grants, each of which total over $2 million in funding. All of the 11 affected papers will be corrected or retracted, according to the ORI notice.
If you could help reduce the waste of tens of billions of dollars per year in research spending, you’d do it, right?
This is the second in a series of two guest posts about the havoc misidentified cell lines can wreak on research, from Leonard P. Freedman, president of the Global Biological Standards Institute. Freedman who published a paper last summer detailing the financial costs of non-reproducible research — namely, tens of billions of dollars per year. Some of that non-reproducible research is due to the use of contaminated or misidentified cell lines. He writes about one key step to tackling the problem: Ask every scientist to use a relatively inexpensive technique to validate the identity of their cell lines.
Meanwhile, we have to deal with the issue of all the previously published papers that relied on problematic cell lines, now contaminating the scientific literature. Scroll down to the bottom of the post to take a poll on what you think should be done about those papers.
Leonard Freedman
As new frontiers of science emerge, from Pluto to proteins, the very cornerstone of the scientific process—reproducibility—has also reared its head as a huge problem. Estimates of irreproducibility rates of published peer-reviewed papers range from 51% to 89%. An analysis that two colleagues and I recently published in PLOS Biology suggests the U.S. spends $28 billion per year on non-reproducible preclinical research; global spending could be up to $60 billion per year. This lack of reproducibility typically results from cumulative errors or flaws in one or more of the following areas: biological reagents and reference materials, study design, laboratory protocols, and data analysis and reporting. Given the size, scale, and especially the complexity of reproducing preclinical research, there is no single magic bullet fix. This is a difficult issue for scientists to own up to, and for the public to grasp.
What if we told you that approximately 1 in 6 researchers working with human cells are using the wrong cell line? In other words, they believe they are studying the effects of a drug on breast cancer cells, for instance, but what they really have are cells from the bladder. That is the unfortunate reality in life science research today, affecting hundreds of labs. It’s a major source of problematic papers which cannot be replicated, wasting scientists’ time and funding.
We’re pleased to present a guest post from Amanda Capes-Davis, chair of the International Cell Line Authentication Committee (ICLAC), a voluntary scientific committee created to improve awareness of misidentified cell lines. She also collects news about cell line and culture contamination. This is the first in a series of two posts from guest authors about how problematic cell lines are contaminating the scientific literature, and how we can clean it up.
In 2010, I worked alongside Ian Freshney of Glasgow University and other colleagues to publish a list of cross-contaminated or otherwise misidentified cell lines in the International Journal of Cancer. This database of false cell lines is now curated by the International Cell Line Authentication Committee (ICLAC).
We’re presenting a Q&A session with Peter Wilmshurst, now a part-time consultant cardiologist who has spent decades embroiled in misconduct investigations as a whistleblower.
Peter Wilmshurst
Retraction Watch: A UK judge recently upheld two findings of dishonesty by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service against Andrew Dowson, director of headache services at King’s College Hospital and your former co-investigator. Were you pleased with the verdict? (Last week, Dowson also began a four-month suspension from practicing medicine in the UK.)
Peter Wilmshurst: In part, because I was pleased that he was shown to be dishonest, because I knew that he was, which was why I reported him. But I wasn’t pleased in the sense that I don’t think the investigation dealt with all the issues involved in the Migraine Intervention with STARflex Technology (MIST) Trial.
Authors have retracted a large meta-analysis claiming that rising levels of carbon dioxide don’t always reduce nutrients in plants.
After commenters on PubPeer raised concerns, the authors say they found several unintentional errors in their data that could “significantly change conclusions” of the paper in Plant Ecology, according to the retraction note.
The paper found that the impact of rising CO2 depends on many factors — in some cases, extra amounts of this greenhouse gas could actually increase plant nutrients. Trouble is, some of the papers that cited the now-retracted article came to the opposite conclusion: Increased carbon dioxide levels do decrease plant nutrients.
The retraction note for “CO2 effects on plant nutrient concentration depend on plant functional group and available nitrogen: a meta-analysis” explains some of the specifics of the errors, and says that there was “no evidence of bias:”
A paper on the genetics underlying a common neurological disorder has issued a correction that influences the results of the paper.
“Genetic Diagnosis of Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease in a Population by Next-Generation Sequencing” was published in BioMed Research International, and looked at 81 families with the disease. The researchers identified mutations that might be connected to the disease. The problem, says the correction note, is that the authors classified a couple variants in one patient’s genes as “likely pathogenic,” when their true nature was less clear.
The Journal of Biological Chemistry is retracting four papers by a pair of cancer researchers at Tulane University,bringing their total to eight.
The retractions are all for reusing parts of figures, either within a paper or from other papers by the pair. Thanks to a new policy at the journal to publish informative notes, we know the figures that were problematic, and the papers that they borrow from.
An investigation by Tong Wu and Chang Han’s former employer, the University of Pittsburgh, had already led to four retractions for the pair, including two issued this summer.
In one figure, there was “an undisclosed splice.” Another figure contained two panels that were “mistakenly from the same sample.”
The 2013 paper in question, “Chronic Morphine Treatment Attenuates Cell Growth of Human BT474 Breast Cancer Cells by Rearrangement of the ErbB Signalling Network,” has been cited four times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Piero Anversa‘s departure follows the dismissal of his suit last summer. Anversa filed the suit with colleague Annarosa Leri, claiming that an investigation into their work damaged their reputations:
they lost a multimillion-dollar offer to purchase their company, Autologous/Progenital; and both Plaintiffs have had possible employment offers at several institutions postponed.
Anversa’s lawyer, Tracey Miner, confirmed that he was moving:
A former cancer researcher has falsified data in 11 studies, according to the results of a investigation scheduled to be published in the Federal Register tomorrow.
