Retracted: Paper claiming immunochemotherapy more effective in morning
5 hours ago
- #retraction notice
- #scientific misconduct
- #research integrity
- Retraction of a 2026 Nature Medicine paper on time-of-day immunochemotherapy for non-small cell lung cancer due to serious concerns.
- Issues include inconsistencies in study registration (NCT05549037) regarding endpoints, eligibility, sample size, and design, with the translated protocol dated 2022 but referencing 2023-2024 studies, and discrepancies between Chinese and English versions attributed to administrative errors.
- Additional concerns involve unusual data patterns: smoother PFS curve than typical, no censoring in the first year, no adverse events leading to treatment discontinuation, and similar adverse event rates between arms despite efficacy differences, alongside randomization on treatment day and deviations from imaging schedules.
- Authors provided a time-stamped original protocol, ethics approval, translations, and source data, but editors lost confidence in result integrity due to the extent of problems.
- Some authors agreed to the retraction, while others did not respond to correspondence.