The cover story in last week’s issue of The Cancer Letter featured a retraction of a Nature Medicine paper demonstrating that giving patients immunochemotherapy before 3:00 p.m. led to massive improvements in overall survival and progression-free survival.
In this week's episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast, editor and publisher Paul Goldberg, and associate editor Jacquelyn Cobb revisit the high-profile retraction.
The retracted study, one of the first to provide prospective, randomized data on the topic of chronomedicine in cancer immunotherapy, was retracted due to a litany of errors that began to be flagged by the scientific community nearly immediately after the study was published.
“When you come up with results, which these folks did, that are really just unbelievably cool and immediately in principle applicable in the clinic, of course, everybody's going to check them. And if you have any booboos in there, they'll find them,” Paul said.
While the cover story in last week’s issue ended up including a sort of “love letter to the scientific process,” with sources Jedd D. Wolchok and Rachel Humphrey proclaiming that the snafu was in fact a signal that the scientific process is working, Paul had his own take on the issue.
“My question with something like that always is the same. And I've done a lot of stories about these kinds of booboos and retractions,” Paul said. “The question is the process works, as you say, but sometimes the process really should be prevented from having to work, because if you've got ... What's the French word? Dreck, that should be obviously found in peer-review. Just leave the process, let the process concentrate on something bigger, which I think is what we had here. And as you guys were rhapsodizing about how wonderfully the process worked, my kishkes were grinding. And that's another French word, I'm sorry.”
“Rachel talks about this, how you throw it out to the community. But I think there's a hygiene question. What do you throw out to the community? Sometimes you want to spare the community. I do believe that in this case we see ... This is just my opinion, I think we see a failure of Nature Medicine to properly peer review this thing and save embarrassment to the investigators who sound like reasonable people. And the community. I mean, of course, ultimately it's really sparing the patients the nonsense.”
This episode is sponsored by City of Hope. Learn more at www.cityofhope.org.
Stories mentioned in this podcast include:
A transcript of this podcast is available: cancerletter.com/podcastc/20260715-retraction/
