Meet the student who brought the Queensland University of Technology stem cell scandal to light QUT doctoral student Luke Cormack who blew the whistle on research results. Picture: Peter Wallis Source: News Limited WHISTLEBLOWER Luke Cormack spent months trying to grow human embryonic stem cells in a QUT lab. He was using a "world-first" synthetic protein recipe devised by fellow QUT scientists supervising his postgraduate studies. The project was a crucial part of Cormack's four years of study for a doctorate in life sciences and it was exciting work. His colleagues had discovered a cheaper and more reliable way to grow human tissue, with huge implications for biology and medicine. Cormack's research concerning stem cells aimed to build on their findings. But no matter what he tried, his cells refused to grow. He later failed his PhD. "My entire PhD was based on that technology," he says. I was in the lab most days and on weekends, trying to get the cells to grow using their culture media and none of mine lasted beyond a couple of generations. The cells just died. I told my supervisors it didn't work. But they said I must be doing it wrong. I just assumed it was my fault. Cormack, 30, accepts there were weaknesses in his thesis by the time he submitted it. But last year he stumbled on evidence that convinced him he'd been hobbled from the start. His revelations have caused a scandal drawing in the university's vice-chancellor, two federal government agencies, a stock-market-listed company and the Crime and Misconduct Commission. Cormack last year found documents in computer files accessible by anyone at QUT showing photos and other images related to the research. The pictures appeared to have been re-labelled multiple times. Each time the results seemed better. Some of the images appeared to have been manipulated in Photoshop. He recognised images of cell growth that had been used in a key research paper. The images looked the same, but the labels showed different results than the ones in the paper, published in 2010. Cormack told the QUT vice-chancellor Professor Peter Coaldrake, prompting an internal inquiry into alleged research misconduct over the paper. The researchers acknowledged there were inadvertent errors in the paper. The inquiry panel found there were errors in the paper that the scientists could not explain. It questioned why the document, which appeared to be groundbreaking, had not been submitted to a more prestigious journal. The panel concluded the mistakes were "believed to be inadvertent rather than fraudulent" and cleared the researchers of misconduct. The Crime and Misconduct Commission accepted the finding. However, there was a separate complaint relating to a grant application containing flawed data from the same project. This year the editor of the US journal that published the research paper, "Stem Cells and Development," retracted it. And last Thursday, the National Health and Medical Research Council, which provided the $275,000 grant, declared it was not satisfied with QUT's handling of the investigation into the grant application. QUT's investigation found that a series of errors led to the application not containing the latest data set, but found it was inadvertent and cleared the researchers of misconduct. The CMC also accepted the finding. The NHMRC said it wanted to bring in the Australian Research Integrity Committee, a body set up in 2011 to ensure research misconduct is investigated properly, to review the procedures used by QUT. The NHMRC also said it was assessing a new allegation of "one purposeful exaggeration" of data not relating to the grant application. Coaldrake has told The Courier-Mail that as a result of the error in the grant application the university could be forced to pay back the grant and risked serious reputational damage. It also emerged this week that Coaldrake had reported himself to the Crime and Misconduct Commission after disclosing the name of another whistleblower involved in the affair, a university employee whose identity is protected under Queensland law. QUT has declined to explain why the disclosure was made during an interview with The Courier-Mail but after the interview the university confirmed the whistleblower's status, prompting Coaldrake's action. Cormack's research relied on the same cell culture media on which his colleagues based their retracted paper. The article had claimed it would sustain human stem cells for 30 or more generations. The main ingredient was a product - VitroGro - repeatedly promoted for its cell growth properties since 2007 by Tissue Therapies, a company spun off from QUT to develop products based on the researchers' work. QUT has a 4 per cent stake in Tissue Therapies. Its value doubled to almost $2 million last Monday when the company announced European regulators had signalled approval for Tissue Therapie's wound-healing technology, also based on VitroGro. The lead QUT researcher, Professor Zee Upton, who also has a paid consulting role as chief scientific adviser to Tissue Therapies, has declined to provide details of several sets of independent testing carried out on the cell growth formula. She says all the results are commercially confidential. Finding evidence that appeared to him to implicate his lab colleagues took a personal toll on Cormack and led the university to organise counselling for him. Cormack says QUT had since refused to sign off on a letter he has drafted to the external examiners of his thesis asking for guidance, unless he returns data the university claims he has in his possession. The university has also said he cannot seek the advice of an independent expert on whether the discredited research paper impacted his work, nor provide his external examiners with details of the allegations relating to the federal grant. The Courier-Mail has put all of Cormack's allegations to QUT. University Registrar Shard Lorenzo says: "The university does not provide information on matters relating to individual students." Cormack's believes QUT should have given him more support. His initial supervisor, Dr Sean Richards, left QUT in 2009 before the research paper was submitted. Richards, who was not interviewed by QUT's internal inquiry panel, has not responded to a Courier-Mail request for comment. "After Sean left there was no one left with relevant embryonic stem cell expertise working on this project," Cormack says. I was made to feel incompetent for my inability to replicate my supervisor's previously published results. He has since become convinced the cell growth formula doesn't work in relation to stem cells. Coaldrake says the technology was "not responsible" for Cormack's difficulties with his PhD although "it would be difficult to deny a connection" between them. The university has offered to provide Mr Cormack $75,000 to fund a new PhD at another institution. The University of Queensland has said it will take him on, but only if he starts again from scratch. "I just don't think I can face that," he says.