The only reason I think biotech companies are not yet raising hell (and invoking the False Claims Act) is that Thermo Fisher's antibodies are already known to be notoriously bad, and everyone serious seems to have to validate everything themselves.
How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
21–30 of 97 posts
Re: How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
It definitely isn't a good look but I'm not entirely sure where this lands on "the line drawing on my IKEA instruction manual doesn't look like the furniture" to "VW diesel emissions report" spectrum. I'd appreciate if any bioscientists in the audience could clear that up a bit.
This is 'used car salesman' levels of fraud on that scale. People rapidly acknowledge these antibodies work or they don't. There are websites with reviews of them. However in addition to getting ripped off for a few hundred bucks, these antibodies are generally produced by immunizing animals and by faking this data they are unnecessarily increasing the discomfort to these animals for a fraudulent reason. Look up the…
Monoclonal antibodies can't be produced by animals.
Re: How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
#23We noticed this years ago when looking at -- IIRC -- ikaros antibodies. They were clearly faked. Lacking any sort of platform to gain attention we moved on to Abcam and our lab just sort of maintained a mental map of who not to purchase ANYTHING immuno- from.
Re: How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
#24Concerning but not really surprising. They offer about hundred thousand antibodies, a few hundred frauds is likely the tip of the iceberg. > “Similar image” searches using Google Lens, Bing Images or DuckDuckGo betray hundreds more that we have yet to document In my experience these would return any image of an antibody (edit) Western blot, not just the exactly matching background. Would be curious to hear others tho…
From the comments on the article by the author it looks more like 10% so far and they haven't systematically looked. That means ~10% if a probable floor of how much fraud there is.
Not according to the complete comment:
More like 10%, but my search has not been systematic. I am mostly looking where I know I will find image issues based on image filenames and “Find Similar Images” searches.
Re: How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "This image is supposed to demonstrate that the antibody being sold works as intended. It is labeled as “Advanced Verification” data on Thermo Fisher’s site" (links to https://www.thermofisher.com/uk/en/home/life-science/antibod... ) I think it is technically marketing material, but if you have to fabricate your marketing material, that's not a good sign that the material is accurate. If I buy a car based on an adv…
It definitely isn't a good look but I'm not entirely sure where this lands on "the line drawing on my IKEA instruction manual doesn't look like the furniture" to "VW diesel emissions report" spectrum. I'd appreciate if any bioscientists in the audience could clear that up a bit.
Images like this show how specifically the antibody binds to the antigen. Generally, the ideal is to have very specific binding. As such, this type of image (Western blot) would only have single bands in any vertical lane. Any other bands show that the antibody is binding to other molecules.
The evidence of painting out the background is likely someone cleaning up other bands, where the antibody has bound to something other than the intended target. So, they are making out the antibody is better than it actually is.
Copy-pasted bands could be evidence of attempting to make a weak band look stronger, or even adding a band where one didn't exist - potentially the entire blot is fabricated.
Either way, like someone else said, this is like fabricating parts of a data sheet.
It doesn't excuse it, but like someone else said, scientists would never just trust an antibody they bought. They'd do their own tests. Labs will also share notes amongst each other, along the lines of "that antibody is bad, and also strongly binds XYZ. You should try this other one instead".
Re: How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
#26Have the samples found so far, in general, been edited in a way to increase value or potential sales volume? Or are they just more pretty?
Re: How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
#27Someone call bobbybroccoli, they've got a new video to make :P
Re: How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
#28Have the samples found so far, in general, been edited in a way to increase value or potential sales volume? Or are they just more pretty?
Some are just completely fabricated so it's hard to say if they have equivalent uglier images with real data...
Re: How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
#29Have the samples found so far, in general, been edited in a way to increase value or potential sales volume? Or are they just more pretty?
More pretty, which would signify that the sample has less impurities -> better value
Re: How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
#30I have no idea about this catalogue, however, looking at the article and how the image manipulation has happened - it looks very much like "repro" work back in the day. Anything that large companies published in/as magazines, etc, back in the 80/90s first went to a design company. Then to a repro company for the "finishing touches" to make it look nice. Faces were touched up, photo artifacts was removed, everything w…
I disagree. If you look at the photos the painting used to make black blobs shorter. As I understand, black blob vertical position is the weight of a molecule, and they want to hide the fact that there are heavier or lighter molecules. So originally there was a long blob, and they made it look shorter.