GSK's London HeadquartersWIKIMEDIA, KTO288Jingwu Zang, a GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) researcher who established the London-based company’s China presence, has been fired after questions were raised about irregularities in figures accompanying a Nature Medicine paper on the mechanisms of multiple sclerosis (MS) that he coauthored in 2010. GSK conducted an investigation into the paper’s irregularities, and the company officially terminated Zang, who ran the neurodegenerative-disease research center in Shanghai, last Sunday (June 9). “Regretfully, our investigation has established that certain data in the paper were indeed misrepresented,” said GSK in a statement posted on June 10. “We’ve shared our conclusion that the paper should be retracted and are in the process of asking all of the authors to sign a statement to that effect.”
At issue is a figure in the paper, which pertained to the role of the interleukin-7 receptor (IL-7R) and T-helper 17 (TH17) immune cells in MS, showing blood samples from healthy human subjects but captioned as coming from MS patients. Both Zang, who led the research team that authored the paper, and Xuebin Liu, first author on the paper, admit the mistake, but claim that it was unintentional and that it does not change their overall conclusion that IL-7R plays a role in the over-expansion of TH17 cells, which contributes to MS progression. Another problem with the paper, uncovered by a pharmaceutical blog after news of the investigation into the blood sample figure surfaced, involves the duplication of an image that is presented as two ...
