By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, Dec 16 (Reuters) – Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has agreed to pay $15 million to resolve claims that the Harvard Medical School affiliate wrongly used National Institutes of Health grant funding to support the publication of studies in medical journals that contained manipulated or duplicated images.
The Boston-based cancer treatment and research center entered into a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice that was made public on Tuesday to resolve claims first raised in a whistleblower lawsuit by a British biologist who last year in a blog post raised concerns about several of its studies.
After that blog post, Dana-Farber announced it was seeking to retract six studies and correct 31 other papers. The settlement concerns 15 cancer studies published from 2014 to 2020 that the government says contained images or data that were misrepresented or duplicated.
Dana-Farber as part of the settlement accepted responsibility for its conduct. The Justice Department said it received credit for voluntarily disclosing additional allegations of research misconduct and implementing remedial measures.
Dana-Farber had no immediate comment.
The underlying lawsuit was filed in April 2024 in Boston by Sholto David, a resident of Wales who holds a PhD in cell and molecular biology, who went public with his analysis of the Dana-Farber studies in a blog post that January.
The Justice Department alleged that Dana-Farber had wrongly used NIH grant funds to conduct cancer research that resulted in a series of publications that reused or duplicated images to represent different experimental conditions or contained rotated, magnified or stretched images.
The principal investigator on those studies failed to exercise sufficient oversight over these researchers while preparing the publications, the Justice Department said.
It said Dana-Farber also submitted grant applications to NIH that contained descriptions of research in an article published in a medical journal in 2015 that also contained misrepresented or duplicated images and data.
The lawsuit was filed pursuant to the False Claims Act, which allows whistleblowers to sue companies on the government’s behalf to recover taxpayer funds paid out based on false claims.
Whistleblowers are entitled to a cut of any recovery. Under the settlement agreement, David will receive a 17.5% share, or nearly $2.63 million. His lawyer had no immediate comment.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Bill Berkrot)
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