Ram Sasisekharan, PhD, a professor of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was accused of plagiarism in a report published this week in the journal mAbs.
The report, from a group of outside researchers, concluded that published work from labs led by Dr. Sasisekharan presented antibody therapies that bore overwhelming resemblances to those previously published by other labs. The researchers examined two of Dr. Sasisekharan's lab's studies: One published in PNAS in 2017 describing a flu antibody and another from a 2018 edition of Cell presenting a Zika virus antibody.
Both studies failed to describe key aspects of their respective antibody therapies; while searching a database to find this missing information, the report's authors discovered similar therapies in studies published years before Dr. Sasisekharan's. Therefore, they wrote, it is difficult to view either study's approach "in any light other than an intent to mislead as to the level of originality and significance of the published work."
In an email to STAT, Dr. Sasisekharan called the report's claims "inaccurate and slanderous." Before coming under this scrutiny, his work earned countless prestigious accolades and led him to start three biotech companies, which have together earned hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.
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