A paper coauthored by geneticist George Church has been retracted following an internal review at a university where several coauthors are based.
The article appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022. The work supports an anti-aging gene therapy developed by BioViva, a company for which Church serves as an adviser. The paper’s authors claim cytomegalovirus (CMV) can be a gene therapy vector for a treatment for “aging-associated decline” that can be inhaled or injected monthly.
The work has been cited 41 times, two of which are citations from corrections to the article, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
Besides Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School in Boston and health science professor at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., the other coauthors include Elizabeth Parrish, the CEO of BioViva; other researchers from the company; and a team of scientists from the Department of Microbiology, Biochemistry, and Molecular Genetics at Rutgers University Medical School.
Parrish and six colleagues disagreed with the retraction, according to the notice, published Monday. The retraction “feels like part of the ongoing effort to block real longevity science from reaching the public,” Parrish told Retraction Watch.
The move follows an “internal review” at Rutgers, according to the notice. The institution requested PNAS retract the paper for “data discrepancies” in two of the figures.
Church told us leading up to the study, he recommended the use of larger viral vectors — CMV — in the study, recommended preclinical animal trials, and helped design and review the study.
Church said he was “on the fence” about the retraction, and that he considered the “evidence both pro and con” to be “weak.” The notice reports that he agreed with the retraction.
“The main issue that I saw was that the raw datasets were not adequately backed up,” he said, but also said he “respects” the claims of the article. There is a “strong possibility that this was merely sloppy, rather than wrong,” Church told us.
Church said problems with the figures were “small, possibly accidental and did not affect the conclusions.”
The retraction is the first for Church, who has authored over 700 papers. But critiques of the paper, and the work surrounding it, predate the retraction.
Sleuth and image expert Elisabeth Bik noted the discrepancies cited in the retraction notice on PubPeer in 2023, writing two panels in one of the figures “appear to be showing the same specimen.”
Bik told us she first encountered concerns with the paper on X, where science writer Frank Swain had posted about the over-saturated blots and different black values of one of the figures. Bik then found the duplication in a separate figure, she told us. Swain has since deleted his X account, but screenshots of the tweets can still be seen on the PubPeer thread.
In the same thread, BioViva CEO Parrish responded to the concerns: “it takes time to take a drug from research to human use. It is required that the reviewers have expertise in what they are reviewing.”
In an email to Retraction Watch, Bik called Parrish’s comment “bewildering,” saying Parrish “appeared to discredit” the commenter’s concerns “because we had no expertise in the matter.” Another commenter, “Apareia labialis,” wrote Parrish’s response “seems like a non sequitur” and said the paper had “less than unbiased reviews.”
The authors issued a correction in August 2022 to update the competing interest disclosure to clarify the paper’s reviewer, William Andrews, a former board member of BioViva, “did not become associated with BioViva until after the article was accepted for publication.”
The paper received a second correction on July 31, 2023, to address the image duplication Bik identified. Blot oversaturation wasn’t mentioned in the correction.
Bik wrote on PubPeer in 2024 the new corrected figure “appears to have a different resolution/compression than the originals.” She then asked if the authors could clarify whether the images were produced during a new experiment or the original study, a question that went unanswered.
It’s not clear when Rutgers intervened, but Rutgers University Office of Research Regulatory Affairs requested the article be retracted “following an internal review of data discrepancies in Figs. 1 and 3,” the notice states. We reached out to the university for more information, and Dory Devlin, assistant vice president of media relations at Rutgers, told us: “We do not comment on investigations.”
Hua Zhu, co-corresponding author, was a principal investigator for BioViva, and his Rutgers laboratory received funding from the company, according to the 2022 correction. In response to a request for comment, Zhu told us, “I have retired and I am in Greenland. I do not have to talk to you.”
Dabbu Jaijyan, the lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers, said he did “not have any specific comment.”
After the retraction, Parrish commented on PubPeer the images “were updated and had no material effect on the outcome of the paper.”
Parrish told Retraction Watch the authors are “deeply shocked that our paper is being retracted over a non-material image issue—one that was already corrected a year ago.”
BioViva was “not informed of or included in the investigation,” Parrish said, stating that if the university does not provide the investigation documents, “this matter will likely end up in court.”
“Our advice: is to never again place blind trust in big institutional interests,” she concluded.
Parrish reported in 2018 that she herself had injections of BioViva’s gene therapy. In 2021, STAT News reported the company sent six dementia patients to Mexico to be injected with the experimental treatment since it wasn’t approved in the U.S.
BioViva’s website says the “core CMV gene therapy” is the subject of a pending patent application, and “will revolutionize the way we treat disease.”
Church serves on the advisory board for the company, telling the Guardian in 2016: “I advise people who need advice and they clearly need advice.”
Church also told us he has been a shareholder in the company, but did not immediately clarify whether he still is.
Church helped initiate the Human Genome Project in 1984. Church’s was the fifth whole genome ever sequenced, and he was the first to make his DNA publicly available to researchers. According to his website, Church has coauthored 716 papers and confirmed to us this was his first retraction.
Aside from his contributions to research, Church is a serial entrepreneur and his lab has helped found over 50 biotech companies, according to his website.
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