Scandalous GSK Paper Retracted

The publication at the center of a June controversy for drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline is finally pulled from the literature.

Written byBob Grant

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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 (T_H17) 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 ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
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From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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