Four images in a 2019 cancer paper turned out to be unreliable, and the authors have pulled it. The study, from researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, ran in the Journal of Experimental Medicine that September. It described a treatment for tumors caused by tuberous sclerosis complex.
Retraction Watch reported the retraction on July 16. The notice is dated June 12.
It says the authors asked for the paper to be withdrawn after a joint investigation by the hospital and the medical school. Four images “have been found unreliable due to image duplication,” the notice reads, and data in one figure “do not accurately represent the source data.” It adds: “The authors have lost confidence in the data and believe the most responsible course of action is to retract the article.”
Who is on the paper
Corresponding author David Kwiatkowski is an oncologist at Brigham and Women’s and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and a professor at Harvard Medical School. Several of the 12 authors work in the hospital’s Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine division. Other coauthors include Elizabeth Henske, who directs the Center for LAM Research and Clinical Care at Brigham and Women’s, and John Asara, who directs mass spectrometry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Neither answered Retraction Watch’s request for comment.
Two grants from the U.S. Department of Defense and a National Institutes of Health grant awarded to Kwiatkowski partly paid for the work. Clarivate’s Web of Science counts 21 citations.
No comment from the institutions
Kristin Bittinger, dean for faculty and research integrity at Harvard Medical School, declined to give details of the investigation. “Any concerns brought to our attention are reviewed thoroughly in accordance with our institutional policies and applicable regulations,” she said.
Rory Williams, communications director at Rockefeller University Press, which publishes the journal, said the authors themselves told the journal about the institutional inquiry. He could not discuss it, he said, under the publisher’s policies. Kwiatkowski declined to comment on the duplication or on whether other papers of his are under investigation.
Earlier questions on PubPeer
It is the first retraction for any of the authors, according to Retraction Watch’s database. Seven of Kwiatkowski’s other papers have been flagged on PubPeer. The latest comment, made in February, calls images in a 2014 PLOS One paper “much more similar than expected.”
In 2020, commenters noted similar images in three figures of a 2002 paper he coauthored. The authors issued a correction in 2021, saying they had repeated experiments for two of the images because the 18-year-old data was no longer available. A commenter replied soon after that the correction “does not address the very similar images” in the third figure.
A 2014 Journal of Experimental Medicine article by Kwiatkowski and Henske has PubPeer comments about similarities between several images too. Williams did not say whether the journal is looking into it.
