Chad Mirkin, director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University in Chicago, received one quarter of this year’s Kavli Prize in nanoscience for his work on spherical nucleic acids (SNAs), the topic of the PNAS article.
The PNAS paper, "Multimodal neuro-nanotechnology: Challenging the existing paradigm in glioblastoma therapy," had mentioned a clinical trial of an experimental cancer drug from Exicure. The experimental drug showed a “33% overall response rate at the highest dosage,” according to the PNAS paper. In his critique, Raphaël Lévy, a professor of physics at the Université Paris Sorbonne Nord wrote: "No reference is provided but the figure appears to come from an interim report presented by the company (press release and presentation at a conference). The 33% are in fact 2 patients from a sub-group of 6 patients."
The correction to the article adds four references regarding the drug and its performance in clinical trials. PNAS declined to publish Lévy’s letter. Readers will "be unaware that this correction results from my comment, which Chad Mirkin tried to silence with a legal threat, and that PNAS decided not to publish," Lévy said. "They will also not know that the results are from an interim report of a clinical trial that stopped several years ago. Thus this correction does nothing to correct the main problem".
