Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital have recommended that more than 30 papers from a former researcher be retracted, according to Retraction Watch's Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus.
Piero Anversa, a former lab director there, studied cardiac stem cells and claimed that he and his colleagues had uncovered such c-kit cells, but, as Oransky and Marcus note, his lab's findings raised questions. Now, they write at Stat News, Harvard and Brigham and Women's have found that 31 papers from Anversa included falsified or fabricated data.
Oransky and Marcus add that the Brigham previously settled with the US Department of Justice over allegations that Anversa and two colleagues fraudulently obtained funding from the National Institutes of Health for $10 million, but that it's unclear how this recent finding may tie in with that settlement. In addition, Oransky and Marcus note that just which papers the institutes are referring to isn't known, though they said the journals that published the papers have been informed.
Cincinnati Children's Jeffery Molkentin tells Oransky and Marcus that he hopes this will help set the record straight. "There are no stem cells in the heart. Quit trying to publish those results," he says.