Harvard, Brigham and Women’s press for 31 retractions of cardiac stem cell research
Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital are recommending 31 papers authored by a former lab director be retracted from medical journals, STAT reported this week.
The move comes a year after the papers’ principal author and cardiac stem cell researcher, Piero Anversa, was accused of using his and his colleagues’ work to fraudulently obtain federal funding. Brigham and Women’s agreed to a $10 million settlement with the U.S. government over the suit, and Anversa’s lab was closed in 2015.
Now, Harvard is calling for the retraction of 31 of Anversa’s published studies after an investigation concluded his work was, at least in part, fabricated.
“Following a review of research conducted in the former lab of Piero Anversa, we determined that 31 publications included falsified and/or fabricated data,” a spokesperson for Harvard and the hospital told STAT. “We have notified all relevant journals.”
The institutions haven’t released names of the journals, but Circulation retracted one of Anversa’s papers in 2014 and The Lancet issued an expression of concern about another that same year.
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After graduating from Indiana University-Bloomington with a bachelor’s in journalism, Anicka joined TriMed’s Chicago team in 2017 covering cardiology. Close to her heart is long-form journalism, Pilot G-2 pens, dark chocolate and her dog Harper Lee.