A scientific misconduct investigation at a research laboratory at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, has derailed a promising research project aimed at developing a potent immune system booster for cancer immunotherapy.
The investigation, conducted earlier this year, has also led to the retraction of between 15 and 17 papers published between 2002 and 2009 in nine journals and to the termination of a scientist who had worked in the lab for almost a decade, according to the Mayo Clinic. The reseracher, Suresh Radhakrishnan, says he has been wrongly dismissed.
Researchers in the lab of Larry Pease eight years ago identified an antibody in a patient’s serum which appeared to stimulate the function of dendritic cells in the immune system, potentiating immune response. The group had developed a cancer vaccine strategy based on the research, and the project had become a main focus of the lab’s work.
According to Robert Nellis, a Mayo Clinic spokesperson, researchers in Pease’s lab began to get different findings in working with the antibody than those the group had previously reported in published work. They tried unsuccessfully to replicate those experiments. Pease then turned to the Mayo Clinic authorities, accusing Suresh Radhakrishnan, a researcher in the group, of tampering with their attempts to validate the past work. An investigation launched by the institution found Radhakrishnan guilty of scientific misconduct. The institution fired Radhakrishnan, and the lab decided to retract all of the published work containing data that could not be verified, Nellis says.
Some of the retractions are still in progress; six retraction notices were posted in the June issue of the Journal of Immunology. [Hat tip: DrugMonkey]
“The laboratory has moved on and refocused its efforts along other lines,” Nellis says, and plans to commercialize the work have been halted.
Radhakrishnan contends that he was not to blame, and that the evidence against him was circumstantial. “I did not forge the data,” he says, adding that “it was more of a default decision” made because he could not provide concrete evidence of his innocence. Instead, he says, “there are multiple reasons within the realm of biology” that could explain the antibody’s loss of activity and the group’s failure to replicate the studies. (Several possible scenarios are described in a comment he posted to a retraction letter for a study published in PLoS ONE.)
But in a retraction published in PNAS earlier this month, signed by Radhakirhsnan, Pease and a third co-author, Esteban Celis at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in Tampa, Florida, the scientists write: “We do not believe something has happened recently to the reagent changing its potency.”
Bogoljub Ciric, an author on several of the retracted papers and now a researcher at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, says that what really transpired is still unclear. “I actually think [Radhakrishanan] is the only person who knows what’s true – even Dr Pease doesn’t really know what’s true,” he says.
Radhakrishnan says he does not contest the retractions. “In accordance with scientific principles, if the data fail to replicate, a retraction was the proper thing to do,” he says. “My respect for Dr Pease has not changed.”
“It’s a very sad ending to a very fruitful project,” says Radhakrishnan.
Image: A dendritic cell, via Wikipedia, under creative commons.