More than 18,000 questionable images found in antibody catalogues of 15 companies

Thousands of antibodies sold by multiple research vendors have catalogue images that appear to have been digitally altered, according to a scientific-integrity specialist who published his findings on 25 August. Reese Richardson, a metascientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, reported more than 18,000 questionable "validation images" associated with antibodies sold by 15 companies, and released a database of them publicly.

The finding follows an earlier search in May, when Richardson and fellow image-integrity sleuths identified more than 100 problematic images in the antibody catalogue of Thermo Fisher Scientific. Validation images — typically western blots showing that an antibody binds its target protein — are among the few pieces of evidence buyers can consult before purchasing from catalogues offering hundreds of thousands of products. "These images are really one of the few things you have to go on," said Sholto David, a molecular biologist and research-integrity specialist in Oxford, UK.

Richardson wrote a program to automatically adjust the black and white levels of more than 270,000 catalogue images to increase contrast and reveal alterations, then manually checked each one. Four vendors are tied to thousands of flagged images each: G-Biosciences (6,388), Thermo Fisher (5,580), LSBio (2,695) and Origene (2,236); most other vendors are associated with a few hundred. A striking pattern was repeated backgrounds: some 13,800 images shared one of just seven backgrounds, in some cases across different companies — background noise is normally random. "That particular type of image alteration or manipulation suggests that these antibodies were never tested at all in the lab," said Elisabeth Bik, a leading image-integrity specialist in San Francisco.

Companies pushed back on the implications. A Thermo Fisher spokesperson said an ongoing review had so far found "no evidence of impact to antibody performance or the underlying scientific data," while LSBio noted the flagged entries "amount to less than 0.04% of the total offering on our platform" but said it would investigate with its partners. G-Biosciences and Origene did not respond to requests for comment. Image alteration does not necessarily mean the underlying product is defective.

Researchers stress, however, that antibody reliability is already a system-wide problem: a 2023 study of 614 commercial antibodies found more than half did not work as advertised, and the annual cost of ineffective antibodies has been estimated at more than US$1 billion. "What we're actually looking at is a system-wide problem that requires a system-wide solution," said Harvinder Virk, a pulmonologist and co-founder of Only Good Antibodies, an open-science validation effort in Leicester, UK. Simona Colantonio, director of the Antibody Characterization Laboratory at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research in Maryland, added that some flagged antibodies "are actually probably very good", but the alterations could place doubt on their performance.

**Sources:** Nature, zenodo.org