Jennifer A. Byrne

Jennifer Byrne is a Professor at University of Sydney, and the Sydney Children’s Hospital Australia. Byrne is notable for not only her oncology work, but the uncovering of academic fraud and junk science in cancer research.

As a result of her and her colleague's investigations, ten papers have been retracted, and others have been noted. As a result the journal Nature rated Byrne as one of "Ten people who matter" in 2019.

Byrne has spent her career investigating adult and childhood cancer. She specializes in biobanking, cancer genetics as well as research integrity.Her PhD involved mapping the loss of the chromosome 11p15 loci in tumours of embryos.

Byrne is currently (2019) employed as the head of the Children’s Cancer Research Unit within the Kids Research Institute, also at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead. Her other positions include Professor of Molecular Oncology, at the Sydney Medical School, at the University of Sydney. In addition, Byrne is the Deputy Director of a group called the Kids Cancer Alliance, which is a Translational Cancer Research Center within the Cancer Institute of NSW.

While reading scientific articles on cancer research, Byrne noticed an odd pattern on a particular gene. The papers described ‘strikingly similar’ experiments on a gene that has been linked with childhood leukemia and breast cancer. She recognized the particular gene, because she had previously worked on it, with a team that had cloned the gene 20 years earlier.

Her experience on that gene made her realize that all of the papers, which were all from China, were describing the wrong nucleotide sequence. A nuclueotide sequence is the specific order of letters which describes how a particular piece of DNA is composed. She noticed that the papers were describing the wrong sequence impacting cancer cells. This wrong sequence implies that: (1) Either the studies were not examining what they reported, or (2) the experiments had not been conducted as described. The implication is that each paper contains the seeds of bad research, that other papers were building on.

Further evidence of fraud or junk science, was suggested as other papers had almost identical reference lists, and used the same sequences for the opposite purposes. This means, that “a sequence used as a positive control in one research paper was used as a negative control in another”. As a result of her and her colleague Cyril Labbe's investigations, at least ten papers have been retracted (in 2019), and about five suspicious papers have been noted.

A colleague described the importance of her whistleblowing cancer work as "finding fraud and bad science".

“Projects like Jennifer’s actually are a key part of that. There are a lot more people looking at papers, there are a lot more available online, so people are finding more issues.” Undark.org described her work as a "fight for dubious cancer research". Byrne also lost her mother to cancer.

• We need to talk about systematic fraud. Nature. 6 February(2019).
• The LIM domain protein LMO4 interacts with the cofactor CtIP and the tumor suppressor BRCA1 and inhibits BRCA1 activity (2002)Sum, E., Peng, B, Yu, X., Chen, J, Byrne, J. et al. Journal of Biological Chemistry. 277:10 (7849-7856).
• Over-expression, amplification, and androgen regulation of TPD52 in prostate cancer (2004) Rubin, et al. Cancer research 64 (11), 3814-3822.

• The journal Nature rated Byrne as one of "Ten people who matter".
• Nature Journal also rated Byrne as the only Australian, and named one of the Top 10 people to watch.

• Byrne was mentioned by Nature retraction watch.
• Byrne was an invited keynote speaker at the Sydney Cancer Conference, 2018.

• The Sydney Morning Herald described her as one of "diverse individuals who have left a mark on science".
• SBS described her work, and the praise from Nature on her work uncovering fraudulent science.
• Nature described Byrne as an “Error Sleuth”, and a researcher on a mission to expose flaws, and describes the tool she built to expose them.
• The tool used to detect flaws in cancer studies was described by the journal Nature.
• Byrne is involved in leadership in the Kid's Cancer Project fundraising for more effective cancer treatments .