Dana-Farber Cancer Institute will pay $15 million to resolve allegations it violated the False Claims Act by making materially false statements and certifications related to NIH research grants, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced.
As part of the settlement, the Boston-based cancer center admitted that its researchers misrepresented and/or duplicated images and data in 14 journal publications from 2014 to 2024, based on studies funded by six NIH grants.
According to the DOJ, the publications reused, duplicated, rotated, magnified, or stretched images to represent different testing conditions and results.
Issues in the journal articles were brought to light early last year by Sholto David, a scientist and blogger from Wales. Under whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act, David will receive $2.6 million.
On Jan. 2, 2024, David published a blog post in which he presented suspicious images from published papers from Dana-Farber researchers, and asserted the images were duplicated segments that made results look stronger. The papers involved lab research on the workings of cells, with one involving bone marrow samples.
Three weeks later, in a statement emailed to the Harvard Crimson, Barrett Rollins, MD, PhD, the research integrity officer at Dana-Farber, said that six manuscripts had retractions underway and that 31 were being corrected.
Dana-Farber admitted that a supervising researcher failed to exercise sufficient oversight in the studies, the Justice Department said, that the cancer center spent funds from those six NIH grants in ways "that were unallowable," and that another researcher received four NIH grants after submitting grant applications referencing one of the journal articles without disclosing the misrepresented or duplicated images and data.
"NIH has limited resources to support important research being conducted at institutions across the country," Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, said in a statement. "Today's settlement demonstrates that the Department of Justice will pursue grantees that undermine the integrity of federal funding decisions by failing to use research funds appropriately or by failing to abide by grant awards' terms and conditions."
According to the DOJ, Dana-Farber "cooperated with the government in this matter and received credit under the Department's guidelines for taking disclosure, cooperation, and remediation into account in False Claims Act cases."
https://www.medpagetoday.com/hematologyoncology/othercancers/119062
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