A 2020 paper that claimed to discover a hyperlink between microbial genomes in tissue and most cancers has been retracted following an evaluation that referred to as the outcomes into query.
The paper, “Microbiome analyses of blood and tissues counsel most cancers diagnostic method,” was revealed in March 2020 and has been cited 610 instances, in line with Clarivate’s Internet of Science. It was retracted June 26. The examine was additionally key to the formation of biotech start-up Micronoma, which didn’t instantly reply to our request for remark.
Rob Knight, corresponding writer and researcher on the College of California San Diego, additionally didn’t instantly reply to our request for remark.
In October 2023, mBio, a journal from the American Society for Microbiology, revealed “Main information evaluation errors invalidate most cancers microbiome findings.” The paper identified a number of main flaws within the the sooner article by Knight’s group.
After downloading and analyzing the unique information, “we discovered virtually immediately that the authors of the Nature paper had made some big errors – that a lot of the micro organism they discovered merely weren’t there, or else have been current in portions that have been 100s of instances smaller than they reported. Oops,” Steven Salzberg, a researcher at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and corresponding writer of the 2023 paper, informed Retraction Watch in an e mail.
Salzberg and his colleagues discovered “a few of these species have been ‘nonsensical,’” he informed us. For instance, the Knight paper discovered that Hepandensovirus was an important species to determine adrenocortical carcinoma. “Nicely, that’s a shrimp virus! Is unnecessary because it doesn’t exist in people,” he informed us.
Knight’s group responded to the criticism in a follow-up paper, “Robustness of most cancers microbiome alerts over a broad vary of methodological variation,” revealed in February 2024 in Oncogene. In it, they defended their authentic findings: “These in depth re-analyses and up to date strategies validate our authentic conclusion that most cancers type-specific microbial signatures exist in TCGA, and present they’re strong to methodology.”
The retraction discover cites Salzberg’s paper and the response from the authors. It reads:
The Editors have retracted this text. After publication, issues concerning the robustness of particular microbial signatures reported as related to most cancers have been delivered to the eye of the Editors. The authors have offered responses to the problems in a separate publication.
Professional post-publication peer evaluation of the problems raised and the authors’ responses has confirmed that a number of the findings of the article are affected and the corresponding conclusions are not supported. All authors agree with this retraction.
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