Early this year, a medical journal article caught the attention of cancer patients and doctors worldwide because of its extraordinary conclusion. Simply changing the time of day that immunotherapy was administered appeared to produce a stunning benefit for lung cancer patients.
Those who received IV infusions in the morning had their cancer kept at bay for twice as long as those who got it in the afternoon, according to the results from a clinical trial in China and published in the journal Nature Medicine in February. The study also reported that the patients lived nearly twice as long.
Several oncologists said that in recent months they and their hospitals had received a flurry of calls from patients inquiring about switching to morning infusions.
But on Wednesday, Nature Medicine retracted the study, citing a list of inconsistencies and irregularities in the trial’s design and results.
“It was too good to be true,” said Dr. Toni Choueiri, an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston who helped conduct the post-publication review that led to the retraction.
Among the issues that the journal cited in its retraction notice: Records that were supposed to be locked before the study started were changed midway through. There were discrepancies between the Chinese version of the study’s plan and the translated version. Every patient remained treated and tracked in the study’s first year, and no one dropped out because of side effects — highly unusual in an oncology study. And unusual patterns were found in the timing of follow-up scans.
