The Journal of Clinical Oncology has retracted a key paper co-authored by Duke University cancer researcher Anil Potti, who was placed under investigation for alleged scientific misconduct after an investigative report in Cancer Letter found that he had inflated his credentials. Potti is on administrative leave while Duke officials investigate alleged misconduct in his work. The retraction, reportedly triggered by Potti’s co-author Joseph Nevins, says that the authors retracted the paper because “they have been unable to reproduce the experiments demonstrating a capacity of a cisplatin response signature to validate in either a collection of ovarian cancer cell lines or ovarian tumor samples.” The paper reported on genomic signatures that could predict the response of ovarian cancer patients to cisplatin drug therapy. It was part of the basis for clinical trials started by Duke in 2007.

Those trials were suspended in 2009 after biostatisticians Keith Baggerly and Kevin Coombes of the University of Texas’ MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston reported that they had been unable to reproduce Potti’s results. The trials were restarted in January 2010, after a review panel appointed by Duke concluded that the data in Potti’s paper was reliable, and suspended again in July 2010, after questions were raised about Potti’s resume.

Duke told Cancer Letter in October that the data being retracted are among those cleared by its review board in 2009, raising the question how it could have reached such an erroneous conclusion.

Image: Anil Potti / Duke Photography