Fabricated cells

Articles about "heart stem cells" are recommended to be withdrawn

Anna Kerman, XX2 century

Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have recommended that 31 articles by Piero Anversa, their former employee and director of the laboratory, be withdrawn from medical journals.

In the works of Dr. Piero Anversa, who studied cardiac stem cells, there were, as HMS and BWH reported to the STAT and Retracrion Watch websites, "falsified and/or fabricated data."

Last year, the hospital agreed to pay the US government $ 10 million in connection with allegations that the work of Dr. Anversa and two of his colleagues was used to fraudulently obtain federal funding. Anversa and Dr. Annarosa Leri – the authors of one withdrawn and one disputed article – at some point unsuccessfully sued Harvard and Brigham and Women's Hospital for pointing out to the journals the shortcomings in their work in 2014. Anversa's laboratory closed in 2015. Anversa, Leri and their colleague Dr. Jan Kajstura no longer work at the hospital.

Brigham Hospital paid a fine to the US Department of Justice, but the American Research Purity Service, which monitors violations during research conducted using funding provided by the National Institutes of Health, did not reach a verdict on this case. The university and the hospital did not indicate in which journals the 31 articles were published, but Circulation magazine withdrew the article by Anversa and his colleagues in 2014, and The Lancet officially expressed concern about other material.

It is unclear whether the call for the withdrawal of articles coming from Harvard and Brigham Hospital has anything to do with the latter's deal with the government.

"After checking the studies conducted in the now closed laboratory of Piero Anversa, we determined that 31 publications had falsified and/or fabricated data, and notified all interested journals about it," the university and the hospital told the sites.

Anversa had previously corrected eight of his articles, in many cases due to unspecified conflicts of interest. CardioBrief and MedPage Today wrote last year that Dr. Anvers "practically invented the use of stem cells in cardiology when he first reported on the possibility of regeneration of cardiac cells."

Anversa's work was based on the idea that there are stem cells in the heart that can regenerate the heart muscle. He and his colleagues stated that they had identified such cells, known as c-Kit cells. When different research teams tried to reproduce the results, they failed. The introduction of these cells into damaged hearts was at best with varying success.

However, according to Jeffery Molkentin, a researcher at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, several scientists continue to publish discoveries consistent with Anversa's work.

"Maybe the withdrawal of this 31 articles will push the pendulum further to the right, and these people will retreat," Molkentin believes. – It's just depressing to see how these articles all appear. There are no stem cells in the heart. Stop trying to publish these results."

Comment Roman Deev, Director of Science of PJSC "Institute of Human Stem Cells":

You guys don’t know how to do it.

It's a bad story. Unfortunately, the experience of recent years shows us that researchers in pursuit of HYPE sincerely or maliciously begin to believe in their assumptions and canonize them, and the scientific community, which is under the hypnosis of the authority of the scientist declaring a sensation, does not double-check bright discoveries right away. Unfortunately, it should be recognized that such excesses in the field of cell biology and regenerative medicine occur with enviable regularity and cause a scandal of a large scale every time.

The review of more than 30 articles (and probably this is not the final yet) by the highly cited Professor Anversa is another illustration of this sad pattern. We remember the skepticism with which the classical histological community reacted to the declaration of the existence and possibilities of the so-called "heart stem cells" and how in recent years, due to the ambiguous results of experiments and quite unambiguous results of cardiac catastrophes in the clinic, this concept began to drift towards a fiasco. With his research, Professor Anvers did the most unforgivable thing – he gave hope. The hope that hundreds of millions of people dying from coronary heart disease can be cured by activating or transplanting a special, previously unknown population of working myocardial cells. However, after several years of work to test this concept, data began to appear that most likely we are talking about vascular cells – endothelial precursors, and not at all about true heart stem cells.

It is impossible not to agree with the opinion of Harlan Krumholz that the scientific community does not yet know exactly the actual article-by-article reasons for the withdrawal of publications, and this would be extremely important for understanding the depth of the fraud imputed to the professor for several years. The investigation of Professor Anversa's activities has been going on for several years. So, in 2014, a lawsuit took place in which he defended the right to protect his professional reputation in connection with accusations of improper control over the publication of false data. In 2017, it was recognized that some of his data was still fabricated, to which colleagues noticed: "This is almost the entire range of work of this laboratory and, therefore, it is almost an entire area of research that is in question."

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