Animal Activists File Federal Complaint Against Dana-Farber

Updated February 13, 2024 at 11:02 a.m.

Activists against animal experimentation filed a federal complaint Sunday alleging that researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute had committed data falsification.

The complaint targeted research from one particular study on breast cancer using mouse models. Published in March 2023 by Nature Communications, the paper was later retracted in December, less than one year later.

The federal complaint — filed by advocacy group Stop Animal Exploitation Now with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Research Integrity — claimed that the paper’s retraction warranted a full misconduct review into the related research, which was allegedly funded by three federal grants totalling over $2 million.

Nature Communications wrote in the December retraction that “an investigation conducted after its publication discovered several instances of image overlap and identified irregularities in the source data provided by the authors.”

“The Editors therefore no longer have confidence in the integrity of the data in this article,” they added.

Nature wrote that all authors agreed to the retraction.

The federal complaint comes after a data investigation blogger alleged last month that four senior researchers at DFCI falsified data across dozens of papers. DFCI later initiated retractions to six papers and corrections to 31 more.

SAEN Executive Director Michael A. Budkie, who filed the federal complaint, wrote in the complaint that in addition to the data falsification, “the validity of this study is highly questionable because studying cancer in mice simply doesn’t work.”

Mouse models are commonly used in scientific research, including studies on breast cancer.

In a Monday interview with The Crimson, Budkie said that SAEN has previously filed similar complaints against researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, following which the scientists were allegedly found guilty of research misconduct.

Budkie described the retracted Dana-Farber article as “disturbing,” and said that “it’s clear that the use of animals is very closely connected to research misconduct.”

DFCI spokesperson Ellen Berlin wrote in an emailed statement to The Crimson that “the paper cited had been undergoing review for some time.”

“Any credible issue raised about a research publication and brought to our attention is given a comprehensive review,” Berlin wrote.

ORI spokesperson Joya Patel declined to comment, writing that “ORI is not able to confirm or deny the existence of any potential pending cases” and that “if there is a case finding of misconduct, it will be posted to ORI’s case summaries page.”

Spokespeople from Harvard Medical School, Nature Communications, and the ORI did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.

Geoffrey Shapiro, the primary author on the paper, also did not respond to a request for comment.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.

—Staff writer Akshaya Ravi can be reached at akshaya.ravi@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @akshayaravi22.