The new president of the Italian Medicines Agency is Robert Nisticò, a fifty-year-old neuroscientist and pharmacologist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. On the recommendation of the Minister of Health Orazio Schillaci, the State-Regions conference yesterday gave the green light to the appointment. After the stormy resignation of the virologist Giorgio Palù, Schillaci had promised a “European” profile and Nisticò responds to the identikit. He has 181 publications to his credit and before Tor Vergata he worked in Bristol and Nottingham (UK), was laboratory director at the European Brain Research Institute (Ebri) and is part of the commission on orphan drugs of the European Medicines Agency (Ema).
A CURRICULUM very respectable, perhaps a little too similar to that of the eighty-three-year-old father Giuseppe, who was full professor of pharmacology at Tor Vergata, general director at the Ebri and represented Italy on various commissions at the EMA. «Pino» Nisticò, former senator of Forza Italia, was undersecretary of Health in the first Berlusconi government, president of Calabria in 1995 and then a European parliamentarian.
NISTICO SON he will preside over the main national drug control agency for five years. It is not an easy task: it will have to test the new structure of the agency after a reform which, according to many observers, has diminished its supervisory power over the pharmaceutical industry. The mission is complicated by the increasingly frequent scandals that shake the scientific community. The number of searches withdrawn after the discovery of fraud or gross errors is growing. According to a recent estimate by the University of Copenhagen, around 20% of scientific publications in the medical field show signs of data manipulation.
Not even Nisticò is immune from the problem. The poster has in fact discovered at least five scientific publications signed by the Tor Vergata pharmacologist and containing “duplicated” images, in which the same photograph taken under the electron microscope is used several times in reference to different experiments. Three other studies by him had already been reported on the site pubpeer.com, the database where scientists report suspicious research. The studies with recycled figures signed by the new Aifa president therefore rise to eight, and are spread between 2000 and 2019.
THE ANOMALIES they are also confirmed by the expert eye of Elisabeth Bik, probably the world’s greatest expert on scientific fraud. «This is a notable number of articles» she comments with the poster. And she adds that she also found a study by Nisticò with an obvious duplicate image.
The recycled images have been published in highly prestigious magazines such as i Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (the most authoritative scientific journal together with Nature And Science), Nature Communications And Scientific Reportswhich boast the most rigorous control standards and yet do not even verify the originality of the images they publish.
Yet the use of images obtained in one experiment to illustrate others never carried out is one of the most well-known scams among specialists, when it does not happen by mistake. Identifying with the naked eye an image recycled in the sea of scientific literature is practically impossible: in the majority of cases they are enlargements of cellular tissues, little more than barely recognizable colored spots. But today software based on artificial intelligence – the poster uses one called ImageTwin, among the many available to scientists – they allow you to find anomalies in a few seconds. Furthermore, the recycling of figures probably represents only the tip of the iceberg, given that there are many methods for falsifying research that can elude even artificial intelligence.
THE STORY involving Nisticò presents several similarities with that of the health minister Orazio Schillaci, also the author of several “suspicious” studies. Or the former president of the Conference of Rectors Salvatore Cuzzocrea, another pharmacologist whose over a hundred research studies with obvious anomalies have been reported.
Unlike the minister and the rector, who coordinated the research, Nisticò did not play a role of particular responsibility in the studies under examination. The presumption of innocence, therefore, suggests that he was not the one who deliberately manipulated the data. Any errors or scams would have occurred without his knowledge and until proven otherwise he will not have to answer for them directly.
GIVEN ITS ROLE as the new president of AIFA, however, the matter is even more worrying. In fact, it dramatically highlights the endemic diffusion of incorrect or fraudulent research. The case demonstrates the poor ability of scientists to control even the studies they sign personally. From today Nisticò must monitor the data that demonstrate the safety and effectiveness of the drugs we take. If not even the research on which he signed is above suspicion, we all have something to worry about.
