Correction for Hsu et al., Characterizing the developmental pathways TTF-1, NKX2-8, and PAX9 in lung cancer

MEDICAL SCIENCES Correction for “Characterizing the developmental pathways TTF-1, NKX2–8, and PAX9 in lung cancer,” by David S. Hsu, Chaitanya R. Acharya, Bala S. Balakumaran, Richard F. Riedel, Mickey K. Kim, Marvaretta Stevenson, Sascha Tuchman, Sayan Mukherjee, William Barry, Holly K. Dressman, Joseph R. Nevins, Scott Powers, David Mu, and Anil Potti, which appeared in issue 13, March 31, 2009, of Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (106:5312–5317; first published March 11, 2009; 10.1073/pnas.0900827106).

The authors note, “We wish to bring to your attention an issue regarding our PNAS publication referenced above. The focus of the paper was the characterization of the signaling pathways of TTF-1, NKX2–8, and PAX9 in lung cancer using a transcriptome-based approach. As such, gene expression signatures representative of the activation of individual transcription factors (TFs), TTF-1, NKX2–8, or PAX9 were developed and were found to have prognostic implication in a data set of clinically annotated lung cancer specimens (Figs. 1–3).

“A second validation was then performed in an independent data set of lung cancer specimens. However, the source publication of the gene expression dataset (1) was retracted by the paper's authors in March 2011, calling into question the validity of the results using this dataset as described in Fig. 4, and with a subset of the data in Fig. S7. In addition, we have not been able to reproduce results reported in Fig. S6, which contains a subset of the data shown in Fig. 4. Given this finding, we believe that the affected figure in the paper (Fig. 4), as well as the data in Figs. S6 and S7 that report an analysis of a subset of the data in Fig. 4, are no longer valid.

“Finally, we also note that a specific portion of analysis (i.e., cisplatin sensitivity prediction) presented in Fig. 5 can no longer be supported, because the publication describing the cisplatin signature has been retracted (2). However, this issue does not alter the validity of the Fig. 5 data describing the unsupervised hierarchical clustering of 56 lung cancer cell lines using the three TF signatures (Fig. 5A Upper) and the experimental determination of cisplatin sensitivity (Fig. 5B Right). More importantly, the final conclusion of Fig. 5, which is that activation of the TF is correlated with sensitivity to cisplatin (Fig. 5B Right), remains unaltered. Importantly, we do not believe that this correction alters the primary conclusions of the paper.”