On December 16, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it had reached a $15 million settlement with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to resolve False Claims Act allegations that Dana-Farber researchers relied on inaccurate biological images to win NIH grants. Eugenie Reich and her co-counsel Gregg Shapiro filed a False Claims Act qui tam complaint against Dana Farber on April 22, 2024.
In the settlement, Dana-Farber admitted that:
(a) a team supervised by a senior Dana-Farber researcher used NIH funding to generate publications that “contained certain images and data that were misrepresented and/or duplicated, including, for example: (1) reusing images to represent different experimental conditions; (2) duplicating images to represent different testing conditions, mice, and/or timepoints; or (3) rotating, magnifying, or stretching images;” and
(b) a second senior Dana-Farber researcher submitted NIH applications citing a 2015 Nature Medicine article, “The Cyclophilin A-CD147 complex promotes the proliferation and homing of multiple myeloma cells,” with “images and data [that] were misrepresented and/or duplicated, including, for example, that: (1) images were rotated and duplicated to represent (a) a control sample and a test sample in the same experiment, and (b) different test samples for the same experimental condition; (2) blot bands were stretched and reused to represent the results of two different experiments; (3) images were duplicated to represent two different mice; and (4) other images were magnified and duplicated.” According to the settlement agreement, Dana-Farber’s grant applications did not inform NIH that the article contained misrepresented, duplicated and manipulated images to represent different experimental conditions, experiments, or mice.
Prior to filing his complaint, Dr. David reported his findings of inaccurate data in Dana-Farber researchers’ publications to Dana-Farber’s Research Integrity Office, the articles’ authors, and relevant journals. Dr. David’s subsequent qui tam complaint remained sealed for 20 months while DOJ conducted an investigation. During the seal period, Dr. David, Ms. Reich, and Mr. Shapiro between them spent hundreds of hours reviewing documents in support of the investigation, after which the government elected to award a whistleblower share of 17.5%.