A cancer researcher tampered with data and fudged images in a presentation and grant application, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) reported.

Magnifying glass Image: Wikimedia

According to ORI's notice released this Fall, Nagendra Ningaraj, formerly an associate professor of neurological surgery and cancer biology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, switched images of control and experimentally treated brain tumors and presented data from older experiments as new findings.

The data were included in a presentation during the American Association for Cancer Research meeting in 2005 and in a grant to the National Institutes of Health.

Ningaraj's research focused on new approaches to treat brain tumors using an agonist to help a drug traverse the normal blood-brain barrier and reach the tumor.

A spokesperson from ORI told The Scientist in an email that the misconduct was first uncovered when one of Ningaraj's coauthors and colleagues noticed something unusual in the data.

Upon investigation, it was discovered that Ningaraj had switched the experimental image of brain tumors treated with both an agonist and antitumor drug with the control image of tumors receiving only the anticancer drug and no agonist. Ningaraj's actual experiment showed, surprisingly, that there was more crossing of the blood-brain barrier without the agonist. By reversing the data, he was able to support his hypothesis that the agonist increased the antitumor drug's ability to cross the blood-brain tumor barrier, and thus increased its anticancer activity, said a spokesperson from ORI.

In an NIH grant application, Ningaraj included (and relabeled) old images and mass spectral data obtained from different experiments, claiming them as new data.

The spokesperson from ORI noted that it is not possible to determine how the falsified images affected work by others in the field.

According to the spokesperson, Ningaraj gave several inconsistent explanations for the swapped images over time, sometimes claiming he was unaware of the switch, sometimes saying he swapped the images because a technician told him the tissue samples had been mislabeled.

Ningaraj, who is currently doing cancer research at Mercer University School of Medicine in Savannah, Georgia, was placed on administrative leave from Vanderbilt on May 3, 2005. He did not continue his research there and withdrew his portion of the NIH grant application.

Since leaving Vanderbilt in 2005, Ningaraj has continued to investigate ways to break through the blood-brain barrier and blood-brain tumor barrier, publishing 4 papers in the journals Cancer Biology & Therapy, BMC Cancer, European Journal of Pharmacology, and Expert Opinion on Drug Delivery.

Ningaraj declined to comment on the ORI finding. The Vanderbilt University Medical Center's Office of News and Public Affairs issued a statement saying: "The findings of misconduct were limited to falsification of images associated with Dr. Ningaraj's research." A Vanderbilt spokesperson declined to comment further.

As reported in the Federal Register, Ningaraj has neither confirmed nor denied the findings of scientific misconduct, though he has entered into a voluntary settlement agreement. As part of the agreement, he is prohibited from participating in research supported by the Public Health Service until August 2012 unless the ORI first receives a signed agreement stating that he will only provide legitimate data.

Correction (posted December 23): It has come to our attention that the misconduct was limited to 1 grant application and 1 presentation. As a result, we have corrected the story from its original version.


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