The invalidation of a research paper published by The Lancet Oncology marks the third time in recent months that work by former Duke cancer researcher Dr. Anil Potti has been retracted by a scientific journal.
The paper, “Validation of gene signatures that predict the response of breast cancer to neoadjuvant chemotherapy,” asserted that treatment of breast cancer with chemotherapy is enhanced with the use of “gene signatures.” It was cited 108 times, according to Google Scholar.
The co-authors with connections to Duke listed in the paper are Dr. Joseph Nevins, Barbara Levine Professor of Breast Cancer Genomics, Sayan Mukherjee, assistant professor for the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, and Chaitanya Acharya, a graduate student.
According to a release on The Lancet Oncology’s website, the journal chose to retract the work because the work was based on an approach reported in a paper published in the medical journal Nature Medicine that has since been retracted.
“Re-examination of the validation datasets used for the Nature Medicine study has uncovered errors in the labeling of the clinical response in some of the datasets,” the release noted. “Reanalysis of the predictive accuracy with correctly labeled data has shown that in two instances the reported signatures do not predict the response of the validation samples to chemotherapy.”
Potti resigned from his posts at Duke in November and has been accused of falsifying portions of his academic resume in addition to producing flawed research concerning biological markers and individualized chemotherapy treatments.
The first retraction of a paper co-authored by Potti and Nevins occurred in mid-November by the Journal of Clinical Oncology when Nevins—one of Potti’s mentors at the IGSP—found that the paper’s scientific methodology could not be reproduced. The 2006 Nature Medicine paper was then officially retracted earlier this month.
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