MD Anderson tried — and failed — to resolve research credit dispute between two scientists, new documents show

Early last year, MD Anderson Cancer Center leadership had a problem on their hands: a contentious dispute between one of its most powerful researchers and a junior scientist over authorship, credit, and charges of verbal abuse. High-ranking officials at the cancer center tried — and failed — to resolve the feud, and documents obtained by STAT shed new light on the deep divisions at the heart of this case.

The Texas cancer center outsourced assessing the conflict between early-career nephrologist Jamie Lin and leading oncologist Padmanee Sharma to the law firm Ropes & Gray. The firm investigated the authorship and scientific credit portions of the dispute and concluded that Sharma was likely responsible for a scientific hypothesis at the heart of the feud and should be named as a co-senior author on a key manuscript.

But a separate investigation, commissioned by Lin and conducted by a former official at the federal Office of Research Integrity, tells a somewhat different story. That review looked into plagiarism after Sharma claimed Lin had wrongly omitted the senior researcher as an author from a manuscript built on research to which Sharma contributed. But this second investigation found no evidence of plagiarism between two manuscripts submitted to the journals Cancer Immunology Research and Journal of Clinical Investigation Insight.

Lin provided STAT with copies of an executive summary of the Ropes & Gray investigation as well as the conclusions of the plagiarism investigation. These documents are alluded to in legal filings but have not been previously reported. Lin has filed a lawsuit against Sharma in the Harris County District Court alleging retaliation, harassment, threatening, and intellectual theft by Sharma; she’s also asking for $5 million in damages.

Disputes around scientific credit and alleged bullying are common in academia, experts told STAT, but they’re typically resolved behind closed doors and rarely in favor of the alleged victim. The lawsuit has thrown these issues — as well as the process the nation’s largest cancer center has taken to resolve them — into public view. Experts warned that these disputes can stall key medical discoveries, which were funded by public dollars, from benefiting patients.

STAT reached out to MD Anderson, Sharma, the Ropes & Gray investigators, and other co-authors on the papers involved in this dispute, all of whom failed to respond or declined to answer specific questions. That included Lin’s husband, immunotherapy researcher Cassian Yee, who declined to speak on the record. MD Anderson replied in an email that it does not comment on internal employee matters.

These reports, framed around different questions and paid for by different parties, offer fresh insight into an intense and complicated case. But they do not cover the full breadth of the dispute, and there are notable inconsistencies between them, court filings, and other documentation Lin provided STAT.

What’s notably missing from the reports is any assessment of whether Sharma verbally abused, harassed, or threatened Lin and others, a key part of the lawsuit. In reviewing emails and other documentation that STAT obtained from Lin, research ethics experts said that Sharma’s language and alleged behavior was discourteous at a minimum and could be considered consistent with definitions of abuse — especially given the power imbalance between the two researchers. Sharma is associate vice president of immunobiology at MD Anderson and scientific director of an institute named after her husband, Nobel laureate James Allison.

“At some point, you want a senior academic researcher to behave in a more model fashion,” said Lisa Rasmussen, a research ethicist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “Particularly because of the power distribution between the higher and lower-power people.”

A promising idea

The dispute centers around research findings that may lead to safer ways to protect the kidneys of cancer patients taking immune checkpoint inhibitors. These are powerful anti-cancer drugs that rev up the immune system but can unintentionally cause hyperactive immune cells to damage healthy, non-cancerous tissues like the kidneys. This is a rare complication, and it’s treatable if doctors can confirm the kidney injury is due to immunotherapy, not other causes. Currently, the way to do that is through a kidney biopsy, a procedure that can lead to bleeding and other complications.

MD Anderson researchers found that certain telltale gene activation patterns, also known as signatures, associated with out-of-place aggregates of immune cells called tertiary lymphoid structures (TLS), and this gene signature appeared to be related to kidney injury from immunotherapy toxicity. That meant that rather than taking a potentially dangerous biopsy, physicians might be able to tell if a patient was suffering from kidney damage due to the immunotherapy drugs versus a different cause by looking for those gene signatures and linked proteins. This application of TLS in immune nephritis was a discovery that Lin said could have crucial clinical significance.

“Obviously it has to be further vetted,” she said in an interview with STAT. “Sometimes people come up with biomarkers, but to come up with a biomarker where you know what to do next? That’s definitely going to have an impact.”

Publishing this work began to go awry in the summer of 2021. Lin alleges in her lawsuit that Sharma tried to coerce Lin into adding her onto the author list of a manuscript she was preparing to submit to the journal Cancer Immunology Research (CIR). Lin claims that Sharma told her that Lin needed to be a “corresponding author” to get credit for the work Lin had done, adding that Sharma said she should be the last author, a position reserved for a senior scientist who typically oversaw the work. Lin alleges in the suit that when she tried to resist Sharma’s demands, the senior faculty member began to berate her and that threatening, harassing behavior continued from Sharma for months.

Sharma later emailed the editor of CIR to request a pause on the paper’s review. That paper was never published. The next year, Lin tried to publish a different scientific paper on TLS signatures in immune nephritis in the Journal of Clinical Investigation Insight, or JCI Insight. Sharma sent another email to the editor of JCI Insight the day the paper appeared online.

“It seems that Dr. Lin took all of our work on this project and, along with her husband, Dr. Yee, accumulated additional nephritis samples that they analyzed for TLS (based on our original work). They published the work in JCI Insight without including us as co-authors. This constitutes an ethical issue,” Sharma wrote to JCI Insight on Dec. 6, 2022, copying Allison on the message. “We recommended moving Dr. Lin from first (and co-corresponding author) and recommended to list her as the second author,” Sharma also wrote, referring to the CIR paper.

JCI Insight halted the paper’s progress before final publication after this email. “The insinuation is plagiarism. She’s saying you used data that wasn’t yours, and you’re plagiarizing from another paper,” Lin told STAT regarding the email. “I went straight to MD Anderson and made them aware, and they said they’d come up with a solution.”

A tale of two external reports

Shortly after Lin contacted MD Anderson, the institute hired Ropes & Gray to investigate the dispute. Typically, allegations of plagiarism are the domain of the Texas institute’s office of research integrity, but Lin said that MD Anderson was treating the issue as one of authorship. So Lin and her husband, MD Anderson immunologist Cassian Yee, hired former National Institutes of Health research integrity officer Alan Price to determine if there was plagiarism.

Price’s report notes that Lin provided him with all the data and patient records used in both the CIR and JCI Insight papers for his investigation. “I found no overlap in the numerous detailed records in the CIR and JCII manuscript files,” Price wrote in his full report. “I conclude there is no basis for apparent allegations of plagiarism of the data in the [JCI Insight] manuscript from the CIR manuscript, both of which were written by Dr. Lin.”

In a statement to STAT, Price said that he stood firmly by this conclusion and that he had nothing more to add.

Ropes & Gray, however, was given a different task. The firm’s representatives, an attorney named Mark Barnes and a physician named Barbara Bierer, also a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, wrote in their executive summary that MD Anderson had requested “an external, independent review concerning an authorship dispute.”

Barnes and Bierer conducted interviews with seven of the MD Anderson faculty who were co-authors on either the CIR or JCI Insight manuscripts and requested that they submit supporting documentation. That included scores of manuscript drafts, emails, memoranda, invoices, slide decks, and scientific figures submitted by Lin. After about three months, Barnes and Bierer were unable to arrive at a definitive conclusion on who should take credit for the idea to look for TLS in immunotherapy-induced nephritis, saying that “circumstantial evidence” suggested it should go to Sharma.

“The account given by the legitimate first author of the CIR manuscript, Dr. Lin, must be afforded weight, but the fact remains that TLS has been within the research scope and aims of Dr. Sharma, and she and two other co-senior authors – Drs. Abudayyeh and Diab – state that the TLS idea came from Dr. Sharma. We cannot make a definitive conclusion on this point, but we believe it is more likely than not that the TLS discovery is attributable to Dr. Sharma,” Barnes and Bierer wrote in March 2023.

They added that Sharma and the other two authors, Ala Abudayyeh and Adi Diab, should be included as authors in the JCI Insight manuscript, but James Allison should not be named as an author since there was no direct evidence he contributed meaningfully to the work. At the end of the Ropes & Gray investigation, Lin requested a copy of the full report from MD Anderson leadership, but it was denied.

“The institution’s settled upon process to resolve this dispute does not include an examination of, or challenge to, the findings by any of the parties. To do so would invite endless cycles of examination by any party, until they arrive at the conclusion that supports their position,” Carin Hagberg, chief academic officer of MD Anderson, wrote to Lin in a March 2023 email reviewed by STAT. “As such, we will not be granting your request or providing the full report to any of the other parties in this dispute.”

Lingering questions

There are key discrepancies between Barnes and Bierer’s executive summary, court filings submitted by Sharma and her lawyer, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and other documentation Lin provided to STAT.

For instance, Hagberg summarized the TLS attribution portion of the Ropes & Gray report in an email filed in court that was originally sent in March of 2023 by saying, “The TLS cannot be reliably attributed to Dr. Cassian Yee, and the preponderance of evidence supports attributing the TLS finding to Dr. Sharma.” According to the Ropes & Gray summary, this is based on Sharma having studied TLS in other settings in the past and Sharma, Abudayyeh, and Diab’s claim the idea was Sharma’s.

However, STAT obtained a letter of recommendation Diab wrote for Lin in July of 2021, nominating her for a young investigator award on the basis of the TLS in immune nephritis research and stating that Lin did nearly all the work and came up with the idea to look for TLS in kidney injury.

“It is Dr. Lin who has led the execution of this project from start to finish; including data collection and assembly, data analysis and interpretation, and abstract writing. I merely provided her with the raw data,” Diab stated in the letter. “Dr. Lin astutely noted that there was an abundance of T and B cell associated genes in ICI-AIN and several differentially expressed genes associated with cytotoxicity and inflammation. After thoughtful contextualization and thorough review of the literature, she hypothesized that these observations might be associated with tertiary lymphoid structures (TLSs).”

That Lin did the overwhelming majority of the work for the project is consistent with Lin’s court filings, but not Sharma’s. In a declaration filed in court, Sharma stated she was the one who had worked with the data and “evaluated all the individual markers and utilized a signature that I had previously published in journals Nature Medicine and Nature to identify a signature for tertiary lymphoid structures.”

But Diab’s letter also doesn’t align with Lin’s statements, which have maintained that it was her husband, Yee, who came up with the TLS idea. When STAT called Diab’s office to inquire about the discrepancy, Diab stated, “We’re not allowed,” hung up before STAT could ask about the issue, and would not answer a follow-up phone call.

Sharma’s declaration also stated that Diab was the one who paid for the data from NanoString Technologies, a biotech company, although Lin provided an invoice dated November 2020 showing that she paid $4,200 for data. In interviews with STAT, Lin also said she was the one who worked with a computational biologist at NanoString to analyze the data that led to the TLS in immune nephritis discovery and provided dozens of pages of her email correspondence with a biologist at the company.

Put together, the external reports still leave room for two potential versions of what may have happened, said UNC’s Rasmussen, “one that favors the junior faculty member, and one that favors the senior.”

But neither assessment looked into the other key aspect of Lin’s lawsuit: allegations that Sharma bullied, threatened, and retaliated against Lin.

Experts on workplace misconduct told STAT that these claims are context-dependent. For instance, Rasmussen said, while the tone of Sharma’s emails may be considered inappropriate for the workplace, that alone may not qualify as academic bullying.

“The fact that Sharma didn’t do what one might hope she would do – it does not lead to a conclusion that she’s lying or pushing her way onto something she didn’t merit,” she said.

Several aspects of the situation need to be taken into account, Rasmussen said, including the power disparity between the senior and junior scientists, who else is involved, and whether this is part of a pattern of behavior. In Lin’s case, there is a vast power gap between herself and Sharma, who holds multiple leadership positions at MD Anderson and numerous cancer research awards and is married to the Nobel laureate Allison. Although Allison did not appear to be directly involved, the fact that he was copied on many emails related to the dispute, was listed as a co-author on the CIR manuscript, and is married to Sharma is significant, Rasmussen said.

“If I disagree with one side of a couple, I’m probably in trouble with the other side of the couple,” she said. “If they always go together, it doesn’t give me as much recourse.”

Other examples of poor conduct might be a famous scientist using their status and position to take a paper out of publication or unfairly taking a target’s name out of scientific papers or “demoting” their position in the author list. “Signs of abusive behavior may include ganging up on a target, threatening over unethical removal of names from confirmed authorship or unreasonable changing [of] authorship position,” said Morteza Mahmoudi, co-founder of the anti-academic bullying project Academic Parity Movement.

It’s possible Lin experienced a version of this, experts said. The Ropes & Gray summary considered Lin to be the “legitimate first author of the CIR manuscript.” However, Sharma had written to the journal editors saying that she and the other co-authors recommended Lin be changed to second author after the dispute began.

“The uses of power here are not graceful, for sure,” said C.K. Gunsalus, director of the National Center for Principled Leadership and Research Ethics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

In emails between Lin, Hagberg and Giulio Draetta, MD Anderson’s chief scientific officer, Lin again brought up her allegations of harassment. “We consider your statements as serious allegations and have included Sheri Wakefield from Human Resources on this email response,” Hagberg and Draetta responded. In interviews, Lin told STAT she didn’t feel that MD Anderson had properly addressed these allegations.

That feels like a typical situation to ethics experts. “The more high-powered an institution is, the more pressure there is to maintain the status quo and not harm the reputation,” Rasmussen said, especially when big-name researchers are involved.

Historically, that often means it’s very difficult for those in less powerful positions to get legitimate concerns addressed. What typically makes the greatest difference, Rasmussen said, is whether other people who have felt harmed or victimized step forward and share their own stories.