Two more retractions for Spanish leukemia researcher Román-Gómez

The journal Haematologica has retracted two papers by José Román-Gómez, both of which involve image manipulation, bringing his total to four.

Here’s the first notice, for a 2007 article titled “Epigenetic regulation of human cancer/testis antigen gene, HAGE, in chronic myeloid leukemia” that has been cited 20 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge:

The authors wish to retract the paper cited above (Haematologica 2007 Feb;92(2):153–62). Figure 2 in that paper was inappropriately reproduced from previously published paper, namely Toyooka S, Toyooka KO, Harada K, Miyajima K, Makarla P, Sathyanarayana UG, Yin J, Sato F, Shivapurkar N, Meltzer SJ, Gazdar AF. Aberrant methylation of the CDH13 (H-cadherin) promoter region in colorectal cancers and adenomas. Cancer Res. 2002 Jun 15;62(12):3382–6. The manipulation of the figure was performed by Dr. Román-Gómez. None of the other authors were involved in or were aware of these events. The authors apologize to the readers, reviewers, and editors of Haematologica for publishing this erroneous image.

And the second (which came out in the journal’s Spanish-language edition), “Metilación del ADN en oncohematología” (or DNA methylation in oncohematology) from 2005:

The authors wish to retract the above cited manuscript. Figure 5 in the published manuscript was inappropriately reproduced using figure 1 in a previously published paper from Shinichi Toyooka, Kiyomi O. Toyooka, Kenichi Harada, Kuniharu Miyajima, Prakash Makarla, Ubaradka G. Sathyanarayana, Jing Yin, Fumiaki Sato, Narayan Shivapurkar, Stephen J. Meltzer, and Adi F. Gazdar. Aberrant Methylation of the CDH13 (H-cadherin) Promoter Region in Colorectal Cancers and Adenomas. Cancer Research 62, 3382–3386, June 15, 2002. The manipulation of the figure was performed by Dr. Román-Gómez. None of the other authors were involved in or were aware of these events. The authors apologize to the readers, reviewers, Sociedad Española de Hematología and editors of Haematologica for publishing these erroneous images.

Román-Gómez has 58 papers listed on Medline since the first appeared in 1995. To our knowledge, only the four retracted articles and a 2003 paper in the Journal of Clinical Oncology that is the subject of an expression of concern have been implicated in the imaging misconduct.