Updated: Anil Potti out at Coastal Cancer Center; practice blames Duke for glowing recommendations

Anil Potti, the former Duke oncologist who has now retracted ten papers, is no longer listed as a staff member at the oncology practice that hired him sometime last year.

The development, first reported by Duke Check, follows a 60 Minutes segment last week focused on Potti and Duke. Duke Check also noted that a Myrtle Beach PR firm had promised a statement later today.

Tenth Potti retraction appears, in Clinical Cancer Research

Anil Potti and his colleagues have retracted another paper, “Characterizing the Clinical Relevance of an Embryonic Stem Cell Phenotype in Lung Adenocarcinoma,” originally published in the December 15, 2009, issue of Clinical Cancer Research.

According to the notice:

The Anil Potti retraction record so far

A 60 Minutes segment Sunday on Anil Potti has drawn national attention to the case, so we thought this would be a good time to compile all of the retractions and corrections in one place.

Duke has said that about a third of Potti’s 40-some-odd papers would be retracted, and another third would have “a portion retracted with other components remaining intact,” so this list will continue to grow. We’ll update it as we hear about new changes.

Retractions:

Two mega-corrections for Anil Potti in the Journal of Clinical Oncology

Anil Potti can add two corrections to his less-and-less impressive publication record. The mega-corrections — part of what we are close to being ready to call a trend in errata notices — in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO) are, however, quite impressive, each with at least a dozen points.

One of the corrections, for a paper cited 15 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, basically removes all references to chemotherapy sensitivity:

Anil Potti and colleagues retract ninth paper, this one in JCO

Former Duke oncology researcher Anil Potti has retracted another paper, marking his ninth withdrawal. The notice in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO) reads:

“An Integrated Genomic-Based Approach to Individualized Treatment of Patients With Advanced-Stage Ovarian Cancer” by Holly K. Dressman, Andrew Berchuck, Gina Chan, Jun Zhai, Andrea Bild, Robyn Sayer, Janiel Cragun, Jennifer Clarke, Regina S. Whitaker, LiHua Li, Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey Marks, Geoffrey S. Ginsburg, Anil Potti, Mike West, Joseph R. Nevins, and Johnathan M. Lancaster (J Clin Oncol 25:517-525, 2007)

The majority of the authors wish to retract this article because

Potti and colleagues retract 2008 JAMA paper

Anil Potti‘s retraction count is now eight with the withdrawal of a 2008 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Here’s the notice, which appeared online in JAMA sometime yesterday:

Seven retractions, a resignation, and lawsuit settlements haven’t stopped Anil Potti from publishing

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” keeps U.S. mail carriers from delivering your letters and packages, and neither seven retractions, nor being forced to resign, nor malpractice settlements (and an ongoing case) keeps former Duke oncologist Anil Potti from publishing papers.

Potti’s latest effort, “A Pathway-Based Approach to Identify Molecular Biomarkers in Cancer,” appeared  last month in the Annals of Surgical Oncology. The subject of the review is the same as many of his now-retracted papers, none of which are cited by the new paper.

Anil Potti reprimanded by North Carolina state medical board, as lawsuit settlements surface

There are a few new developments in the case of Anil Potti, the former Duke oncologist who resigned amidst an investigation into clinical trials he was running — and has been forced to retract seven papers, at last count.

Over the weekend, The Cancer Letter, which has been out front on this case, noted that the North Carolina Medical Board reprimanded Potti late last month. A reprimand carries no sanctions, but is entered into a physician’s public record. According to the consent decree:

New in PNAS: Potti retraction number seven, and a Potti correction

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has published the seventh retraction for former Duke researcher Anil Potti, who now faces a lawsuit in the midst of an ongoing investigation into his work:

Retraction for “A genomic approach to colon cancer risk stratification yields biologic insights into therapeutic opportunities,” by Katherine S. Garman, Chaitanya R. Acharya, Elena Edelman, Marian Grade, Jochen Gaedcke, Shivani Sud, William Barry, Anna Mae Diehl, Dawn Provenzale, Geoffrey S. Ginsburg, B. Michael Ghadimi, Thomas Ried, Joseph R. Nevins, Sayan Mukherjee, David Hsu, and Anil Potti, which appeared in issue 49, December 9, 2008, of Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (105:19432–19437; first published December 2, 2008; 10.1073/pnas.0806674105).

The authors wish to note the following: “We wish to retract this article because we have been unable to reproduce certain key experiments described in the paper regarding validation and use of the colon cancer prognostic signature. This includes the validation performed with dataset E-MEXP-1224, as reported in Fig. 2A, as well as the generation of prognostic scores for colon cancer cell lines, as reported in Fig. 4. Because these results are fundamental to the conclusions of the paper, the authors formally retract the paper. We deeply regret the impact of this action on the work of other investigators.”

The 2008 paper, which has been cited 27 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, was already the subject of a minor 2009 correction:

Potti retraction tally grows to six with a withdrawal in PLoS ONE, and will likely end up near a dozen

Anil Potti and his former Duke colleagues have retracted a sixth paper, this one in PLoS ONE.

According to the retraction notice for “An Integrated Approach to the Prediction of Chemotherapeutic Response in Patients with Breast Cancer,” the withdrawal was prompted by the retraction of a Nature Medicine paper that formed the basis of the PLoS ONE study’s approach: