Debunked cancer study about blood tests has wide ripple effects, Wall Street Journal reports

Research groups that have relied on data from an apparently flawed cancer study now must deal with criticism of the original findings.

Steven Salzberg, PhD

That's the conclusion of Steven Salzberg, a PhD computational biologist at Johns Hopkins University, according to a story by Nidhi Subbaraman in The Wall Street Journal last week.

Salzberg, whose critique, written with colleagues in the field, led to the study's recent retraction, is quoted as saying the faulty conclusions have "polluted the literature."

The WSJ piece says the lead researcher, Professor Rob Knight of the University of California, San Diego, had indicated the 2020 study had "reported that 32 different cancers, from prostate tumors to skin melanomas, harbored unique combinations of microbes, chiefly bacteria and viruses, that acted as fingerprints for each type of tumor. The idea had clinical significance: A blood test could allow physicians to use evidence of microbes detected in the blood as a proxy to diagnose the cancers."

Since the study's publication in 2020 in Nature magazine, more than 600 papers have cited it, Subbraman's article says, and at least a dozen groups based new work on its data. 

In addition, the initial co-researchers had "launched a startup to capitalize on their findings" — although support for it "has dried up" since the criticism became public.

Knight, "a heavyweight in the field of microbiology," the WSJ piece adds, had been "widely regarded as a pioneer of big-date microbial analysis. His resume lists multiple awards and prestigious fellowships at scientific societies, two books and a TED talk."

The original study analyzed data from more than 17,000 samples from over 10,000 people with cancer.

Among the problems discovered was that "some microbes the researchers flagged as components of cancer signatures weren't known to exist in humans." To boot, the critics, whose work was published in the journal mBio, apparently couldn't find "most of the bacteria reported in the Nature study."

Salzberg told The World Street Journal that "it wasn't a close call. This data is completely wrong."

According to the story, a wide ripple effect has followed the criticism: "The publishers and journal editors of eight studies have been reviewing the papers."

More details on studies that had to be retracted can be found in Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer, a VitalityPress book that I, Woody Weingarten, aimed at male caregivers.