A former professor and vice provost for research at the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in New York, falsified data in two published papers, according to findings from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI). Shaker Mousa, who was also chairman and executive vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research Institute at Albany, already has at least 10 retractions and two corrections, by count of Retraction Watch.
The findings relate to research funded by two grants. One, on which Mousa was the sole principal investigator from 2009-2010, received nearly $375,000 in funding. The other grant awarded over $6 million from 1997-2020 to Thomas Scanlan, a professor at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, as principal investigator. Mousa received nearly $1.9 million in total funding as sole principal investigator.
ORI’s findings follow comments on PubPeer from 2022, when commenter “Actinopolyspora biskrensis” compared images from the 2013 Nanomedicine paper "Tetraiodothyroacetic acid-conjugated PLGA nanoparticles: a nanomedicine approach to treat drug-resistant breast cancer" with those that appeared in another Mousa paper from 2009, “The anti-angiogenic activity of NSITC, a specific cathepsin L inhibitor.” The latter was retracted in October 2023.
As part of a settlement with ORI, Mousa agreed to have his research supervised for four years and will not serve on federal committees, boards, or peer review committees during that time.
