A clinical immunologist who was fired from New York University School of Medicine in May is suing his previous employer for allegedly giving him the pink slip after he accused his former supervisor of manipulating data related to an experimental cancer vaccine.
In his complaint, David O’Neill, who served for eight years as core leader of the NYU Cancer Center’s Vaccine and Cell Therapy Unit, alleges that his supervisor prevented him from personally talking about data at last year’s American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in order to present the findings herself in the best possible light, and then retaliated by firing him when he made complaints of research misconduct.
According to O’Neill, the data from that presentation is now under review in Nature Medicine (which maintains a strict firewall between the news and manuscript sides of the journal). O’Neill says he stands by the manuscript’s findings but continues to have issues with the data analysis.
The study in question compared a dendritic cell-based vaccine to a more traditional vaccine in about 50 subjects with advanced melanoma. According to the ASCO abstract, which O’Neill wrote and submitted, the simpler adjuvant-based vaccine was significantly more immunogenic than the expensive and difficult-to-manufacture dendritic cell vaccine.
After the abstract was selected, O’Neill claims that his supervisor, Nina Bhardwaj, insisted that she give the presentation. He also contends that Bhardwaj, who has made her career researching dendritic cell vaccines for both cancer and HIV and owns many patents related to the approach, blocked his promotion and introduced changes to the paper under review to make the dendritic cell vaccine look more effective.
“I’m not happy with the statistics,” O’Neill told Nature Medicine. “I think the conclusions of the paper are okay, but I would like to have you guys pick your own statistician and take your own look.”
According to NYU Langone Medical Center spokesperson Lisa Greiner, university officials reviewed O’Neill’s concerns when he first raised them and found no evidence of misdoings, concluding that O’Neill’s dispute constituted a difference of opinion regarding statistical methodology. But “given the seriousness of the allegations raised in this suit, we will conduct a new inquiry,” she wrote in an email, adding that O’Neill’s termination was unrelated to his purported whistleblowing.
O’Neill is seeking reinstatement, lost wages, punitive damages and a declaration that the university violated its own policies on ethical conduct.