A paper touting a cellular protein’s ability to reduce amyloid burden in Alzheimer’s disease models has been retracted. A pair of images in the paper appear to be duplicates, according to the retraction notice, posted 11 September in Neurobiology of Disease.
Eva Carro led the 2009 study as a researcher at the Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre and the Instituto de Salud de Charles III (ISCIII), a government research organization. The work was funded with grants from ISCIII’s Fund for Research in Health Sciences and the Community of Madrid. This marks the second retraction for Carro.
Concerns about the 2009 paper first emerged a decade after publication, nearly six years before the retraction. The paper was cited 63 times prior to the retraction, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
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n the newly retracted study, the authors used a lentiviral vector to manipulate the levels of a protein called gelsolin in a transgenic mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease; the protein, which regulates the cytoskeleton, is known to bind amyloid beta. They also measured gelsolin in the choroid plexus of postmortem human brains and in the cerebrospinal fluid of living people, comparing participants who have Alzheimer’s disease with healthy controls. The purportedly duplicated images appear in a figure validating the viral vector.
An anonymous commenter on PubPeer pointed out similarities between the two images in a post dated November 2019. Data sleuth Kevin Patrick, who posts on the forum under the alias Actinopolyspora biskrensis, chimed in minutes later with similar concerns.
Carro responded the following month, posting images to PubPeer that she claimed depicted the correct gel bands. These new figures did not answer the sleuths’ questions, Patrick told The Transmitter in an interview. He says the images were unlabeled and that Carro uploaded the same file twice. When he followed up with Carro, she provided labeled figures but no way to validate that they contained the proper images.