A long running inquiry into ‘protein engineer’ Homme Hellinga has been wrapped up, but the result is not being made public.

Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, where Hellinga works, says that its internal inquiry into allegations of misconduct is “confidential”.

The story – broken today by university paper The Chronicle – has been rumbling along since Hellinga retracted papers published in Science and the Journal of Molecular Biology. It later spread, with questions raised over work published in Nature and PNAS. (See: Protein-design papers challenged, October 2009.)

Now the university says it has completed its review of the case, but it can’t reveal what the conclusion was. It cites confidentiality as the reason it cannot report any of the outcomes of the investigation.

Nature was unable to reach Hellinga today, but The Chronicle quotes a statement from him also citing confidentiality and further stating, “The results of the investigation are only made public in the event of a federal finding of research misconduct. Accordingly, I do not anticipate issuing a more substantive public statement on the investigation or its findings and expect the same is true of the University.”

As Nature Newsnoted last year, “[Hellinga’s] work was considered a milestone for showing that it was possible to use computer algorithms to design proteins that bound very tightly to small molecules.” But follow up work looking at some of the proteins designed by Hellinga could not get the proteins to work as they were supposed to.