Nature corrects 2011 leukemia study on BCL6 and BCR-ABL1 resistance

Nature issues correction to 2011 cancer study

The scientific journal Nature has issued a formal correction to a 2011 study on a form of leukemia. The notice, published in 2026, addresses two errors in the paper's original figures.

The study, titled "BCL6 enables Ph+ acute lymphoblastic leukaemia cells to survive BCR–ABL1 kinase inhibition," investigated how certain cancer cells resist treatment. The authors state the errors were inadvertent and did not affect the paper's statistical calculations or overall conclusions.

Two specific image errors identified

One error was in the main paper's Figure 2d. The panel labeled “Adriamycin/BCL6 +/+ ” was actually a duplicate image from the “Control/BCL6 −/− ” condition.

The second error was found in Supplementary Figure 21. The authors' own later analysis revealed an inadvertent duplication in the panel labeled “SFO2/Imatinib.”

According to the correction, both mistakes occurred during the assembly of the figures for publication. The journal has published corrected versions of the affected figure panels.

Raw data has been made public

In line with modern scientific transparency practices, the authors have published the original raw data. This includes the image and flow cytometry files related to the corrected figures.

The data is available on Mendeley Data, a public research data repository. The move allows other scientists to independently verify the work.

The key details for accessing this data are:

• Dataset Title: Raw data for Figure 2d and Supplement Figure 21c-d
• Authors: Duy et al., 2011
• Repository: Mendeley Data
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.17632/gn75f35ybc.2

Correction involves large, international team

The original 2011 paper was the work of a large, collaborative team from several major institutions. The author list for the correction reflects this broad collaboration.

Primary research was conducted at the University of California San Francisco and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Contributing authors also hailed from Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and multiple institutions in Germany.

The corresponding author correction notice is published under the same title and authors as the original work. The formal citation for the correction is Duy, C. et al. Author Correction: BCL6 enables Ph+ acute lymphoblastic leukaemia cells to survive BCR–ABL1 kinase inhibition. Nature (2026).