Fraud Upends Oral Cancer Field, Casting Doubt on Prevention Trial.

The article reports that Norwegian oncologist Jon Sudbø, admitted this week through his attorney to falsifying data in three seminal papers published by top medical journals. The revelations have put on hold a multimillion-dollar oral cancer prevention trial, sponsored in part by the U.S. National Cancer Institute. The fraud is all the more unsettling given the recent fabrications by South Korean researcher Woo Suk Hwang in stem cell science. The papers reported that 26 of 27 individuals with aneuploid mouth lesions having abnormal numbers of chromosomes, developed aggressive oral cancer and were more likely to die of the disease than were those with other types of lesions. An immediate casualty of the fraud may be a 360-person trial of the anti-inflammatory Celebrex, along with another drug, in healthy people with aneuploid mouth lesions. Two reports were published in the March 20, 2005 issue of the "Journal of Clinical Oncology" and the October 15, 2005 issue of the journal "The Lancet."