Expert review: Macchiarini papers on plastic trachea transplants are misconduct

Bad times for the scandal surgeon Paolo Macchiarini and his acolyte Philipp Jungebluth. Misconduct findings led previously to retraction of an oesophagus transplant paper, with more soon to be expected, their employments in academia seem to be definitely a thing of a past. Macchiarini’s big plans of world-shattering trachea and oesophagus transplants in Russia went bust, when his grant funding was not extended and the Federal University of Kazan waved him goodbye. The master’s acolyte Jungebluth is currently suing me in court about my reporting on his own past employment, because he managed to convince the Berlin judge when passing the injunction that all his now proven research misconduct and patient abuse, which led to deaths of several patients, plus several other dishonest deeds of his, had in fact perfectly qualified him for an academic research career at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. A career he claims to have aborted entirely on his own accord, hence his (now only 1/3 successful) court injunction against me. Jungebluth, after having said farewell to his 8 years of thorax surgery training in vain, even claimed in court to be desperately wanted as thoracic surgeon by all Berlin hospitals, including the huge university hospital Charité.

Which brings us to the recent setback for the two trachea transplanters. Their publications regarding the plastic trachea operations at the Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Stockholm, which left three patients dead, were investigated by two external experts. One of the experts was Martin Björck, professor of surgery at University of Uppsala, the other was Detlev Ganten, professor emeritus of pharmacology and former CEO of the Charité. And their fresh report, submitted to the Swedish Central Ethics Review Board (CEPN), does not read like the Berlin Charité or any other medical research institution in Germany, or anywhere else for that matter, might ever consider employing Jungebluth. The central Lancet publication, describing the first plastic trachea transplant performed on Andemariam Beyene (Jungebluth et al, 2011), was slammed as based on misconduct, both ethical as well as research misconduct. It is the same Lancet paper Jungebluth presented to Berlin court as evidence of his scientific fame and excellence.

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Melo and Kalluri defend discredited Nature paper with preprint, where they admit data “adjustments”

Sonia Melo, the Portuguese cheater scientist and her former US-boss Raghu Kalluri issued some days ago a biorxive preprint, which sole purpose is to defend their discredited Nature paper from 2015. There, they originally claimed to have found a unique biomarker for early pancreatic cancer, a much hailed promise to save lives of many cancer patients. However, soon it was found out that the results were not reproducible, the Nature paper Melo et al, 2015 contained evidence of data manipulation (just like other Melo publications with Kalluri and her PhD boss Manel Esteller). The antibody, on which the central evidence for the allegedly unique pancreatic cancer biomarker glypican 1 (GPC1) was based, proved to be delivering staining artefacts; the vendor Thermo Scientific soon discontinued it. Even Kalluri seemingly distanced himself from his results.

Now in their new preprint, Melo and Kalluri claimed to have perfectly reproduced their original 2015 GPC1 results with a new antibody, which however proved to be likely exactly the same as the old one, but sold by a different vendor. As soon as this became known, the authors issued a new preprint version just two days later, featuring yet another entirely new GPC1 antibody, with an utterly new set of results to complement the 6 day older ones. However, also these results are most likely useless. The authors namely freely admit in their preprint method description to have intentionally manipulated their flow cytometry (FACS) data to obtain a positive signal specifically where needed. It seems that one full professor and three research group leaders have absolutely no understanding about data integrity in flow cytometry (or maybe even in research in general). Obviously, they simply adjust the FACS settings for each sample in an analytic row any way it pleases them until they see a result they like. As they don’t even hide it, they seem to think this is the proper way to do science. Continue reading “Melo and Kalluri defend discredited Nature paper with preprint, where they admit data “adjustments”” →

Carlisle’s statistics bombshell names and shames rigged clinical trials

John Carlisle is a British anaesthesiologist, who works in a seaside Torbay Hospital near Exeter, at the English Channel. Despite not being a professor or in academia at all, he is a legend in medical research, because his amazing statistics skills and his fearlessness to use them exposed scientific fraud of several of his esteemed anaesthesiologist colleagues and professors: the retraction record holder Yoshitaka Fujii and his partner Yuhji Saitoh, as well as Scott Reuben and Joachim Boldt. This method needs no access to the original data: the number presented in the published paper suffice to check if they are actually real. Carlisle was fortunate also to have the support of his journal, Anaesthesia, when evidence of data manipulations in their clinical trials was found using his methodology. Now, the editor Carlisle dropped a major bomb by exposing many likely rigged clinical trial publications not only in his own Anaesthesia, but in five more anaesthesiology journals and two “general” ones, the stellar medical research outlets NEJM and JAMA. The clinical trials exposed in the latter for their unrealistic statistics are therefore from various fields of medicine, not just anaesthesiology. The medical publishing scandal caused by Carlisle now is perfect, and the elite journals had no choice but to announce investigations which they even intend to coordinate. Time will show how seriously their effort is meant.

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CNRS lab of Voinnet’s right hand Patrice Dunoyer dissolved by director’s decree

The hammer has fallen. The lab of misconduct-tainted plant scientist Patrice Dunoyer at the CNRS Institut de Biologie Moléculaire des Plantes (IBMP) in Strasbourg, France, has been closed with a 48 hour notice, following the decision of the institute’s director Laurence Maréchal-Drouard. The (now former) lab members were informed by general mailing list announcement; the reasons for closure were officially “not related to integrity concerns”. The only good news for Dunoyer is that he is tenured, and cannot be sacked for his previous research misconduct, because CNRS already punished him for it with a whole one-month suspension.

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Sumitran-Holgersson and Olausson guilty of misconduct and unethical experiments on children

Game over apparently near for the indestructible Swedish regenerative medicine researcher Suchitra Sumitran-Holgersson, after investigations at her University of Gothenburg draw to an end. It is about experimental transplants of decellurised veins “regenerated” with the patient’s own bone marrow cells into three child patients, all of whom ended up in life-long medical care, one patient received a liver transplant after her graft failed, another child suffered severe complications (see this earlier report about an external investigation by Bengt Gerdin into that matter). The University of Gothenburg then established an investigative committee, which followed up on the Gerdin report and specific concerns voiced by a journal editor and a colleague. I publish below the two decisions which revealed that Sumitran-Holgersson and her surgeon partner Michael Olausson never performed any animal testing before recruiting their human patients, they also failed to obtain ethics permits for these operations. Instead the two lied in their publications (Olausson et al, Lancet, 2012; Olausson et al EBioMedicine, 2014) about having obtained ethics votes (something I already uncovered before). During the investigation, Olausson and Sumitran-Holgersson were caught submitting false information to the committee. They were now found guilty of misconduct and ethics breach in both these publications. Continue reading “Sumitran-Holgersson and Olausson guilty of misconduct and unethical experiments on children” →

Retraction, and another looming misconduct finding for Macchiarini and Jungebluth

The misconduct-tainted paper on oesophagus transplants in rats (Sjöqvist et al 2014) by the fallen star of regenerative medicine Paolo Macchiarini is finally retracted by the journal Nature Communications. This happens after Swedish investigations found the authors (primarily the scandal thorax surgeon and his right-hand man Philipp Jungebluth) guilty of data manipulation and research misconduct in September 2016 and after the Karolinska Institutet (KI) shortly before Christmas publicly demanded a retraction (see my report here). Today’s retraction is a major setback for Macchiarini, since his current employment and funding at the Federal University of Kazan (KFU) in Russia depend on his experiments with oesophageal transplants in primates (see my reports here and here). That Russian project was in turn only possible because of Macchiarini’s allegedly successful experiments in rats, published in a prestige journal with “Nature” in its title. This paper’s retraction is therefore probably only the beginning of a whole looming avalanche of bad news for Macchiarini and his acolyte Jungebluth (who currently sues me in court). An expert review of their publication Jungebluth et al 2015 declares the findings of misconduct, ethics breach and patient abuse. The report however has yet to be confirmed by a commission at the Swedish Central Ethics Review Board (CEPN) and then formulated as an official decree by the KI. I publish the expert reviewer report below. Continue reading “Retraction, and another looming misconduct finding for Macchiarini and Jungebluth” →

Würzburg misconduct Commission acquits Walles, dismisses biased medical expert, restarts anew as data manipulations flood in

The University of Würzburg did not ignore the Open Letter in support of my journalism, and has concluded its internal investigation into medical and scientific activities of their trachea transplanters Heike and Thorsten Walles, without finding any misconduct. This was however not the end of it. I was invited to appeal this decision in front of the commission, which I did on March 6^th 2017. In the end, the medical “external consultant”, Roland Jahns (specialist in inner medicine from the University Clinic of Würzburg) was catapulted out of the commission after insulting me as “pseudoscientist” and the entire investigation will be re-opened, with a new consultant to be recruited. The main reason: a newly emerged wealth of evidence of gross data manipulations in the papers by Walles, which readers of my site posted on PubPeer just when I arrived in Würzburg to give evidence.

During my discussion with the Standing Commission for the Investigation of Scientific Misconduct of the University of Würzburg on March 6^th, I was also told that the commission does not see my original text, for which I am facing a court trial on March 16^th, as factually wrong. All information provided there was deemed correct except of one aspect: my readers were said to be led to misunderstand that the trachea transplant operations took place in Würzburg (while they happened in Stuttgart). The commission made clear that their university does not want to be associated with these transplants. They did however admit that the misunderstanding arose because Walles themselves have been placing such false information in media (including this recent article in the Siemens magazine), and even on the University of Würzburg website. The commission however assigned to me the responsibility of checking in advance the truthfulness of such obscure sources. Continue reading “Würzburg misconduct Commission acquits Walles, dismisses biased medical expert, restarts anew as data manipulations flood in” →

For Better Science

Science journalism by Leonid Schneider, on research integrity and academic publishing in life sciences and biomedicine

Category: Research integrity