The senior author for Wang et al., Cell 2024, is also a corresponding author on the retracted Nature Medicine paper. There is a small group of investigators who have pushed this theory very hard and are very invested in it - apparently at the cost of honest science.
Yes, though I’m not sure how involved that group would have been in the day-to-day running of the trial, which is where many of the questions have been raised. I think more attempts to replicate Wang et al. would be hugely valuable!
I agree it's unlikely the Scheiermann group was involved in the day-to-day. But Scheiermann himself is listed on the Nature Medicine manuscript as having "conceived the study, contributed to all study progress and development, contributed to methods, results, interpretation and manuscript writing," and he's among the authors who "verified the underlying data." The problems with this manuscript were obvious almost immediately and he put his name on it anyway - presumably because the result fit the hypothesis they've been pushing for years.
And the whole field is rife with this. Two papers you cite are from the same group - Qian 2021 and Patel 2024 - and they use an early/late cutoff that's 4.5 hours apart. In my opinion this entire field is chasing p-values rather than chasing an understanding of the biology.
Yep, that's fair—it's when the story confirms everything you hope to be true that you have to most aggressively try to find problems with it. Plus, questions first surfaced after ASCO, which would have been a great time for everyone involved to really, REALLY interrogate the results.
On understanding the biology: Have you seen this preprint? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41279119/ I'm maybe misreading it, but it seems like an independent replication of Wang et al. that finds first dose dominates (the same!) but with a 12 hours opposite best time (?!?). So I'm just walking around looking like this today 🤷♀️
The senior author for Wang et al., Cell 2024, is also a corresponding author on the retracted Nature Medicine paper. There is a small group of investigators who have pushed this theory very hard and are very invested in it - apparently at the cost of honest science.
Yes, though I’m not sure how involved that group would have been in the day-to-day running of the trial, which is where many of the questions have been raised. I think more attempts to replicate Wang et al. would be hugely valuable!
I agree it's unlikely the Scheiermann group was involved in the day-to-day. But Scheiermann himself is listed on the Nature Medicine manuscript as having "conceived the study, contributed to all study progress and development, contributed to methods, results, interpretation and manuscript writing," and he's among the authors who "verified the underlying data." The problems with this manuscript were obvious almost immediately and he put his name on it anyway - presumably because the result fit the hypothesis they've been pushing for years.
And the whole field is rife with this. Two papers you cite are from the same group - Qian 2021 and Patel 2024 - and they use an early/late cutoff that's 4.5 hours apart. In my opinion this entire field is chasing p-values rather than chasing an understanding of the biology.
Yep, that's fair—it's when the story confirms everything you hope to be true that you have to most aggressively try to find problems with it. Plus, questions first surfaced after ASCO, which would have been a great time for everyone involved to really, REALLY interrogate the results.
On understanding the biology: Have you seen this preprint? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41279119/ I'm maybe misreading it, but it seems like an independent replication of Wang et al. that finds first dose dominates (the same!) but with a 12 hours opposite best time (?!?). So I'm just walking around looking like this today 🤷♀️