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Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital announced yesterday (October 14) that following an internal investigation they recommend the retraction of 31 papers by a former faculty member, cardiac stem cell researcher Piero Anversa, as Retraction Watch and STAT report. These studies “included falsified and/or fabricated data,” the two institutions tell Retraction Watch and STAT, adding that they have “notified all relevant journals.”
This is the latest in a series of black marks on research by Anversa, who claimed, as early as 2003, to have identified adult stem cells—dubbed c-kit cells—that can regenerate cardiac muscle. Efforts by other labs to reproduce Anversa’s findings and to use the cells to heal damaged hearts have produced contradictory and sometimes mysterious results.
In 2014, Anversa and coauthors had a paper retracted from the journal Circulation after Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s determined that data were “compromised,” ...
