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MComputer teacher Ram Sasisekharan made a name for himself on the idea that computer algorithms and models could lead to better and more powerful therapies, a promise that launched three biotechnology companies and has attracted hundreds of millions of dollars.
But two treatments allegedly discovered with Sasisekharan's computer approach are almost identical to the compounds that had already been described by other laboratories, according to a new article by outside researchers. The authors claim that this discovery casts serious doubt on the integrity of Sasisekharan's research.
"We looked at exactly two cases and found irregularities in both cases," said Tillman Gerngross, CEO of privately held biotechnology company Adimab and co-author of the paper. "For me, if you're sitting in the kitchen and two big cockroaches are walking on the floor, how lucky are there to be two?"
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In a paper published Monday in the journal mAbsGerngross and his colleagues at Adimab said that two antibody treatments described by Sasisekharan's laboratory – one for influenza and the other for Zika virus – "have striking similarities" with previous work by scientists.
The treatment of flu by Sasisekharan, described in 2017 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is almost identical to a published six years earlier in science, according to Adimab. The researchers said that Zika antibody, that Sasisekharan's laboratory described in Cell last year, looks a lot like a described in Nature in 2016.
Sasisekharan did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
In an e-mailed statement, a spokesperson for MIT said, "While federal regulations and MIT policy do not allow us to comment on a particular topic, the integrity of MIT research is paramount. MIT has confidential policies and processes in place to assess issues that may arise. "
In each example reviewed by Adimab, Sasisekharan's laboratory did not publish the amino acid sequences of the antibodies it purportedly designed. In order to verify the work, Adimab researchers searched for the resulting patent applications and cross-checked the details of GenBank, a freely accessible sequence database. This is where they found similarities with earlier work, according to Gerngross, who is also a professor of bioengineering at Dartmouth College.
"We find it difficult to see the approach of these authors in a light other than the intention to deceive as to the level of originality and significance of the published work," wrote the group Adimab.
William Schief, professor of immunology at the Scripps Research Institute, who reviewed the work of Adimab before its publication, said the paper makes a "very strong case."
"If you look at the original [MIT] articles that reported these antibodies, they do not give a very clear description of how they identified the epitope or how they designed the antibodies, "he said.
The implications of Adimab paper extend beyond academia. Visterra, a biotechnology company co-founded in 2008 by Sasisekharan, was developing the anti-flu antibody when it was acquired by the Japanese manufacturer Otsuka. for $ 430 million last year.
A spokesman for Otsuka did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Sasisekharan, a member of the prestigious Koch Institute for Cancer Research through the integration of KIT at MIT, has received great recognition for his work, including from the National Institutes of Health.
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