WIKIMEDIA, NATIONAL CANCER INSTITUTENature Medicine has retracted a paper that contained falsified data almost six months after doubts were raised about the research and the GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) employee who authored it. In June, GSK fired Jungwu Zang, who ran the company’s neurodegenerative disease research center in Shanghai, after irregularities turned up in the 2010 paper, which he coauthored with other GSK scientists and a researcher from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.
The paper detailed the role of the interleukin-7 receptor (IL-7R) and T-helper 17 (TH17) immune cells in multiple sclerosis and contained image of blood samples from healthy subjects and MS patients. One image, Figure 6, erroneously stated that it showed blood cells from MS patients at Baylor. From Nature Medicine’s retraction notice, which cited GSK’s own investigation into the irregularities: “The investigation established that the data depicted in Figure 6 and in Supplementary Figure 7 were erroneously attributed to experiments at Baylor Medical College with blood cells from patients with multiple sclerosis,” it read. “In fact, no data from experiments with blood cells from patients with multiple sclerosis and no data from experiments at Baylor Medical College were included in the paper.”
Though GSK suggested ...
