The biotech company Genentech said today it has found no evidence that Stanford’s embattled president, neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne, tried to suppress misconduct findings involving a 2009 Nature paper soon after he left the company in 2011.
Tessier-Lavigne has been under scrutiny for possible misconduct in some of his papers since November 2022, after a campus newspaper, The Stanford Daily, reported that they contained apparently altered images. Genentech launched its review in response to two Daily stories in February and March describing “alleged fraud and a cover-up” related to a 2009 Nature paper, according to a 5-page summary released today by the company and first reported by STAT. The company’s legal department interviewed more than 35 current and former Genentech employees and examined lab notebooks, meeting minutes, and emails.
The legal team found no evidence that any employees had observed or knew of wrongdoing, that any misconduct complaint about the Nature paper had been filed at Genentech, or that a research misconduct investigation of the study took place there, the report found.
However, Genentech’s review did find some problems in Tessier-Lavigne’s lab at Genentech, where he was a senior executive. A misconduct complaint filed in 2010 against a postdoc on an unrelated project led to a manuscript being withdrawn from a journal and the postdoc being fired. The report also notes that an outside expert verified concerns raised by The Daily that the 2009 paper contains several duplicate or composite images. "We have not determined how these anomalies occurred," the report states. Nature posted a notice of concern on 15 March.
The legal team’s review also describes a frustrating 3-year, failed effort by Genentech scientists to replicate the results of the Nature paper, which had generated excitement because it implicated a protein called death receptor 6 (DR6) in neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease. It states that after Tessier-Lavigne left in 2011 to become president of the Rockefeller University, one senior Genentech official wanted the paper retracted or corrected. But neither Tessier-Lavigne nor his co-authors took that step.
After further attempts to replicate the work, the company terminated its DR6 drug discovery program in 2012.
Tessier-Lavigne is best known for his work in the 1990s on identifying axon guidance molecules, proteins that direct nerve fiber growth in the embryonic brain and spinal cord. Stanford began a misconduct investigation in November 2022 after The Daily reported that The EMBO Journal was looking into allegations of manipulated images in a 2008 paper on which he was a middle author. The university’s board of trustees formed a committee to look into those allegations and concerns posted years earlier on PubPeer, an online forum for commenting on papers, about images in several other papers. The committee hired a law firm to review the papers in consultation with five prominent researchers from outside Stanford.
Concerns about three of the papers had come up in 2015 when Tessier-Lavigne was at Rockefeller and under consideration for the Stanford presidency. At the time, Tessier-Lavigne submitted corrections for the studies, one published in Cell in 1999 and two in Science in 2001. Cell concluded no changes were needed, and Science failed to publish the corrections because of an editorial error. In late December, Cell and Science issued expressions of concern about the three papers and said they were awaiting the results of Stanford’s investigation before taking further action.
Then on 17 February The Daily reported, based on interviews with four senior scientists at Genentech at the time, three not named, that soon after Tessier-Lavigne left Genentech for Rockefeller in 2011, the company found that data in the 2009 Nature paper had been falsified and that Tessier-Lavigne tried to suppress these findings. On 6 March, a follow-up story about the alleged falsifications said Genentech had linked them to a postdoc on the paper.
In statements posted on his lab web page, Tessier-Lavigne called the claims of falsified data and a cover-up “completely and utterly false.” He pointed to 2012 and 2014 papers from his own group that did not support some of the original 2009 findings; this was part of the normal progression of science, he said. In a statement today, he said: “I am not surprised by Genentech’s report, which directly and unequivocally refutes the false and hearsay rumors concerning the 2009 Nature paper and related research.” He also noted that he “was the one who referred” the 2010 “incident” with a postdoc to Genetech's legal department.
The report Genentech released today suggests frustration that the work could not be replicated sparked unfounded rumors of misconduct. “Many hoped [the research] would culminate in a treatment for Alzheimer’s Disease. Many scientists who worked on the project were disheartened by having devoted substantial time and energy to a program whose underlying biology was ultimately proven wrong. That sentiment gave rise to rumors about why the DR6 program failed,” the review summary says.
In a statement, the Stanford board’s investigative committee said it "is aware of and reviewing Genentech's report as part of its ongoing work."
Meanwhile, corresponding authors on the EMBO Journal paper and several others that Tessier-Lavigne co-authored have stepped forward on PubPeer to take responsibility for any image problems, and in some cases have dug up old images or Western blots to help resolve questions. A 2011 study in Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience was corrected on 5 March, and a 2009 paper in genesis: The Journal of Genetics and Development was corrected on 20 March.
Update, 7 April, 10:20 a.m.: This story had been updated with more information from a statement from Tessier-Lavigne and an additional corrected paper.
Correction, 11 April, 1:20 p.m.: An earlier version of this story misstated the timing of Nature’s notice of concern.
doi: 10.1126/science.adi1616
