Paolo Tarantino, Research Fellow Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical Schoolpost, shared a post on linkedIn:
“BREAKING: The most controversial article of the year, claiming that early morning immunotherapy works better than in the afternoon, is now retracted.
After reading the responses provided by the authors to the inconsistencies raised in the web, the Nature Medicine editors no longer have confidence in the integrity of the results. The only prospective evidence that time-of-day matters for immunotherapy is now gone.
To me, this means (at least) two things.
First, it confirms that prudence on this topic was and remains critical. For as inexpensive it may be to give a drug earlier or later in the day, it carries a much more relevant cost: the one of scientific integrity. We owe our patients to make decisions based on solid data. We should not give up this practice too easily, particularly in the presence of several concerning red flags.
Second, this retraction should also prompt a broader reflection on the current state of peer review, in which unpaid reviewers struggle to keep up with a steady rise in submitted papers. Journals need to improve the process by implementing a formal, consistent, in-depth review of each paper by paid professionals. A practice that, in this case, may have avoided a retraction arriving after 22 citations and after inclusion of this study in at least one meta-analysis. And possibly, after some physicians had already changed their practice in IO administration.
For a thoughtful recap of this story, I recommend this well-written new piece in Science Magazine by Laura Agudelo. I’m grateful to Laura for including my perspective in the article.”
Title: RETRACTED ARTICLE: Time-of-day immunochemotherapy in non-small cell lung cancer: a randomized phase 3 trial
Authors: Zhe Huang, Liang Zeng, Zhaohui Ruan, Qun Zeng, Huan Yan, Wenjuan Jiang, Yi Xiong, Chunhua Zhou, Haiyan Yang, Li Liu, Jiacheng Dai, Nachuan Zou, Shidong Xu, Ya Wang, Zhan Wang, Jun Deng, Xue Chen, Jing Wang, Hua Xiang, Xiaomei Li, Boris Duchemann, Guoqiang Chen, Yang Xia, Tony Mok, Christoph Scheiermann, Francis Lévi, Nong Yang, Yongchang Zhang
Read the article here.
Other articles featuring Paolo Tarantino on OncoDaily.