MIT Clears Ram Sasisekharan of Alleged Research Misconduct
June 19, 2023
After over three-and-a-half years of investigations, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that the allegations of research misconduct against Ram Sasisekharan were unfounded.
“There were times I would wake up wondering if it had all been a nightmare,” Sasisekharan, a professor at MIT whose work helped launch six biotech companies, told statnews this week,
In May 2019, the journal mAbs published a perspective by some rival drug researchers, including one from MIT, alleging that Sasisekharan made misleading claims about the discovery of two infectious disease drugs. The molecular sequences of the drugs were more than 90% similar to older molecules discovered by other researchers, they stated.
A few weeks later, “MIT received an internal complaint raising formal allegations of research misconduct against Professor Sasisekharan concerning the same research discussed in the perspective,” Maria Zuber, Vice President for Research at MIT said in a statement in March this year.
In 2019, MIT launched an internal investigation which got the full cooperation of Sasisekharan and members of his lab.
Sasisekharan has been a professor of biological engineering at MIT since 1996. He served as the Director of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology from 2008-12. His research focuses on Glycomics, Infectious Disease, Cancer and Human Pathophysiology and Therapeutics.
“These past three and a half years have been exceedingly difficult for my lab, my family and me” Sasisekharan stated in a post. “The very public attack we endured, together with our inability to defend ourselves publicly, was a most egregious abuse of the research misconduct process. Being attacked publicly, and silenced confidentially, had an extraordinarily negative impact on my laboratory staff and the students we mentor and train.”
MIT’s internal investigation found no “research misconduct for any of the submitted allegations” against Sasisekharan. Since the allegations against him got wide publicity, Sasisekharan reportedly asked MIT to make public the findings of the investigations, which are typically kept confidential.
In her statement, Zuber added that, by the public discourse of the findings, MIT seeks “to bring closure to this matter, quell any remaining rumors or speculation, and assist in fully restoring the reputations of Professor Sasisekharan and the members of his lab. In addition, we are committed to ensuring that Professor Sasisekharan and his lab can return to normal operation.”
Tillman Gerngross, a bioengineering professor at Dartmouth College, and one of the rival researchers and complainant against Sasisekharan, emailed the Wall Street Journal that, “We have no comment on the MIT ‘investigation’—all we had to say on this matter is in the original Mabs paper—anyone can read that paper and draw their own conclusions.”
In 2001, Sasisekharan co-founded Momenta Pharmaceuticals, based in Cambridge, near Boston, with
Christoph Westphal,, Ganesh Venkataraman Kaundinya, Mallik Sundaram and Robert Langer. It develops medicines for rare diseases. In 2020, Momenta was acquired by Johnson & Johnson for $6.5 billion. The purchase included full global rights to nipocalimab, which gave Johnson & Johnson the opportunity to reach more patients by pursuing indications across many autoimmune diseases with substantial unmet medical need in maternal-fetal disorders, neuro-inflammatory disorders, rheumatology, dermatology, and autoimmune hematology. Under Momenta, Nipocalimab received a rare pediatric disease designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Other companies co-founded by Sasisekharan include Cerulean Pharma, based near Boston. Its lead cancer candidate failed in a trial, with the company laying off staff and merging with San Diego based Dare, a reproductive health firm in 2017.
Since 2010, the Sasisekharan Lab at MIT has been building tools for computational antibody engineering. This also led to the creation of commercial opportunities which included technology licensing as well as the creation of the biotechnology companies Tychan and Visterra. Tychan, based in Singapore, seeks to reduce the development timeline of therapeutics leading to clinical application.
Visterra, based near Boston, uses computational and experimental technologies to design and engineer precision antibody-based therapies,.It was acquired by Japan’s Otsuka Pharmaceuticals for $430 million in 2018.
The 2019 article by rival drug researchers, in the journal mAbs,, questioned Sasisekharan’s anti-body research. So the article had “business implications as well,” wrote Derek Lowe a columnist in Science magazine, The “report can't make anyone…(at Otsuka) very happy.”
Sasisekharan received his B.S. in Physical Sciences from Bangalore University. He earned an M.S. in Biophysics from Harvard University and, in 1992, a Ph.D. in Medical Sciences from Harvard Medical School.
Following the MIT finding that allegations against him of research misconduct were unfounded, Sasisekharan stated in a post that “I will be happy to give interviews when I am in a position to help others who have been wrongly accused in academia.”
MIT has policies to deal with a student who “brings a gun to campus,” Peter Dedon, an MIT professor of biological engineering told statnews. “But we don’t have a policy for when one millionaire faculty member attacks another millionaire faculty member using the halls of MIT.”
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