Gregg Semenza

It’s Nobel Prize week, and the work behind mRNA COVID-19 vaccines has just earned the physiology or medicine prize. But this is Retraction Watch, so that’s not what this post is about.

A Nobel prize-winning researcher whose publications have come under scrutiny has retracted his 10th paper for issues with the data and images. 

Gregg Semenza, a professor of genetic medicine and director of the vascular program at Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Cell Engineering in Baltimore, shared the 2019 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for “discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.” 

The pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis had flagged possibly duplicated or manipulated images in Semenza’s publications on PubPeer before 2019, and other sleuths posted more beginning in October 2020. 

Last September, Semenza and his co-authors pulled four papers from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Another PNAS paper, one in Oncogene, and two from the Journal of Biological Chemistry were retracted over the past year, with each notice stating that Semenza requested or agreed to the retractions. 

Today, Molecular Cancer Research has retracted another of the Nobelist’s articles,  “Procollagen Lysyl Hydroxylase 2 Is Essential for Hypoxia-Induced Breast Cancer Metastasis,” which appeared in 2013. The article has been cited 181 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

With a 2011 retraction for a paper co-authored with Naoki Mori – who with 31 retractions sits at No. 24 on our leaderboard – today’s retraction makes 10 for Semenza. More may be on the way. 

The notice states: 

This article (1) has been retracted at the request of the authors. The authors found that lanes 4, 5, and 6 of the HIF-1α immunoblot in Fig. 3A are identical images. An internal review corroborated the authors’ claim, and the editors agreed with the authors’ retraction request. The authors apologize to the scientific community and deeply regret any inconveniences or challenges resulting from the publication and subsequent retraction of this article.

A copy of this Retraction Notice was sent to the last known email addresses for all authors. Four authors (Denis Wirtz, Carmen C. Wong, Daniele M. Gilkes, and Gregg L. Semenza) agreed to the retraction; the 3 remaining authors could not be located.

Semenza did not immediately respond to our request for comment. Johns Hopkins would not comment on whether they were investigating the matter when a reporter from The Baltimore Sun asked this summer.

In October 2020, a PubPeer user commented that the lanes of the figure identified in the retraction notice were “much more similar than expected.” The first author, Daniele M. Gilkes, responded by posting an image of the “original uncropped version.” Another commenter raised more concerns about the image, but Gilkes did not respond again. 

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