Breast tumorsNATIONAL CANCER INSTITUTE
Sheng Wang, assistant professor of medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) Cancer Research Center until last month, committed research misconduct, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Research Integrity (ORI) announced last Friday (August 5). Specifically, the ORI determined that Wang fabricated data published in two 2009 papers in the journals Molecular Endocrinology (ME) and Oncogene, both of which Wang has agreed to retract.
The falsified figures show real-time PCR data—a technique used to locate genes and quantify their expression—and chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP)—used to determine how and where proteins interact with DNA in the cell—to support their conclusions about the HIC1 protein’s pivotal role in tumor suppression.
HIC1 (“hypermethylated in cancer 1”) is a protein known to suppress cell growth. ...
