The two papers, "Heat shock protects cardiac cells from doxorubicin-induced toxicity by activating p38 MAPK and phosphorylation of small heat shock protein 27", and "HSP27 regulates p53 transcriptional activity in doxorubicin-treated fibroblasts and cardiac H9c2 cells: p21 upregulation and G2/M phase cell cycle arrest", first appeared nearly 20 years ago.
A physiology journal has retracted these papers after an institutional investigation found a heart researcher falsified data and figures in the articles. A committee at the Ohio State University found Govindasamy Ilangovan, an associate professor of cardiovascular medicine at the school, falsified figures and reused data, according to the retraction notices published in Heart and Circulatory Physiology, a journal of the American Physiological Society.
One of the papers received a corrigendum in 2021 over a figure "published incorrectly" in the original paper. The investigation found that Ilangovan falsified the updated figure in the corrigendum, and the original "was inaccurate because of the reuse and relabeling" of a Western blot. The retraction notices detail how Ilangovan repurposed and relabelled Western blots from both published and unpublished works.
