A Duke University oncologist who had been the focus of a misconduct investigation has resigned from the university. Dr Anil Potti has voluntarily resigned from his positions as associate professor of medicine at Duke University School of Medicine and at the university's Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy. Dr. Potti's resignation is effective immediately.

Dr Potti had published papers identifying gene signatures in tumours that could predict how a patient would respond to treatment. But his work came under scrutiny after two biostatisticians at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, spent years trying and failing to replicate it. The case was opened this summer when The Cancer Letter discovered that Potti had falsely claimed to have won a Rhodes scholarship.

In addition, Dr. Potti's collaborator, Dr Joseph Nevins, has initiated a process intended to lead to a retraction request regarding a paper previously published in Nature Medicine. This process has been initiated due to concerns about the reproducibility of reported predictors, and their possible effect on the overall conclusions in this paper. Other papers published based on this science are currently being reviewed for any concerns.

The three clinical trials based on this science for which new enrollment was suspended in mid-July, have been closed.

Source: Duke Medicine News and Communications