Journal Retracts Review on Phage Therapy in Blood Cancers Over Citation Concerns

The Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cancer Research and Clinical Oncology has retracted a review article that examined the promise of phage therapy and the role of the microbiome in the care of patients with hematologic malignancies, according to a retraction notice published by Springer Nature. The retracted paper, which appeared in the journal in 2025, had surveyed opportunities, mechanisms, and early clinical evidence for the use of bacteriophages, the viruses that infect and kill bacteria, in a patient population that faces some of the most serious infection-related risks in modern medicine. The notice, published on 17 September 2026 as article number 180 in volume 152 of the journal, states plainly that the Editor-in-Chief has lost confidence in the reliability of the statements and conclusions of the review.

The sequence of events that led to the retraction began shortly after the original article was published on 12 December 2025. According to the retraction notice, concerns were raised regarding irregularities in several of the cited references. The problems identified fall into three broad categories: references that were irrelevant to the claims they were meant to support, references that were incomplete in ways that made them impossible to verify, and discrepancies between the text as cited and the original sources themselves, particularly with respect to author lists. The notice specifically names four problematic citations, including works attributed to Abedon in 2019, to Lebnac and colleagues in 2013, to Bhagwat and colleagues in 2024, and to Chau and colleagues in 2017.

Citation irregularities of this kind matter for reasons that go beyond bibliographic housekeeping. In a review article, the citations are the load-bearing structure of the entire argument. Unlike an original research paper, which rests on data the authors generated themselves, a review synthesizes the published literature, and readers rely on the accuracy of every attribution to trust the synthesis. When a cited source turns out to be irrelevant, incomplete, or misattributed, the chain of evidence connecting a claim to its foundation is broken. In a clinical field such as phage therapy, where clinicians may look to review literature when weighing experimental treatments for critically ill patients, the integrity of that chain carries particular weight.

The retraction notice also documents a procedural failure that likely sealed the article’s fate. The authors were contacted for an explanation of the reference problems, but they failed to provide any response. The notice further states that the authors did not respond to any correspondence from the publisher regarding the retraction notice itself. Under the publication ethics frameworks that govern major scientific publishers, an author’s inability or unwillingness to respond to legitimate editorial inquiries is treated as a serious aggravating factor. Editors are generally expected to give authors an opportunity to explain apparent irregularities, and when that opportunity is declined or ignored, the editor is left with little choice but to act on the evidence available.

The retracted review addressed a topic of genuine and growing importance. Patients with hematologic malignancies, including leukemias, lymphomas, and multiple myeloma, undergo intensive chemotherapy, stem cell transplantation, and other immunosuppressive interventions that leave them profoundly vulnerable to bacterial infections. At the same time, the rise of multidrug-resistant organisms has eroded the effectiveness of the antibiotic arsenal, and infections caused by resistant gram-negative bacteria in particular have become a leading cause of death in this population. Bacteriophage therapy, an approach first explored more than a century ago and largely eclipsed by antibiotics in the West, has re-emerged as a potential salvage strategy, with individual case reports describing the successful use of phage cocktails against otherwise untreatable infections in immunocompromised patients.

The microbiome dimension of the retracted review is equally significant. The communities of microorganisms that inhabit the human gut have been shown in numerous studies to influence outcomes after transplantation and chemotherapy, affecting everything from engraftment to graft-versus-host disease to infection risk. Antibiotic exposure, which is nearly universal in this patient group, disrupts these communities and can promote colonization by resistant pathogens. Phage therapy interacts with this picture in complex ways: phages shape bacterial populations, can transfer genes between bacteria, and may themselves alter microbial community structure. A careful review of these interactions could in principle have provided a valuable map for researchers and clinicians navigating this emerging therapeutic frontier, which is precisely why the retraction represents a real loss to the literature, not merely an administrative event.

The case also illustrates the specific vulnerabilities of the review-article format in the current publishing environment. Reviews are highly cited, relatively quick to produce compared with original research, and attractive targets for authors seeking publication records. The irregularities described in the retraction notice, including irrelevant and incomplete references and author-list discrepancies, are patterns that research-integrity specialists have associated with rushed or careless literature synthesis, and in some cases with the use of generative tools that fabricate or garble citations. The retraction notice does not speculate about the cause of the irregularities, and no finding of misconduct beyond the reference problems is stated. What the notice does establish is that the problems were concrete, specific, and serious enough that the authors’ silence left the editor unable to maintain confidence in the work.

For the scientific community, the mechanics of the retraction are worth understanding. The retraction notice is itself an open-access article, published in the same journal and indexed with its own digital object identifier, 10.1007/s00432-026-06623-5, which is distinct from the identifier of the original paper, 10.1007/s00432-025-06393-6. The original article remains in the scientific record but is now linked to the retraction notice through Crossmark, the publisher-managed service that flags updated or retracted versions of record. Retraction does not erase a paper; it annotates it. Readers, citation databases, and indexing services are expected to treat the retracted article as unreliable, and responsible authors will no longer cite it except to discuss the retraction itself.

The authors of the retracted review were Juanwen Zhang, affiliated with the Department of Chemistry at Lomonosov Moscow State University in Moscow, Russia; Jin Liu, affiliated with Longnan First People’s Hospital in Ganzhou, Jiangxi, China; and Alireza Bayani, affiliated with the Division of Laboratory Hematology and Blood Banking at Shiraz University of Medical Sciences in Shiraz, Iran. The geographic spread of the author team, spanning institutions in Russia, China, and Iran, is not itself unusual in contemporary science, where international collaboration is common, but it does illustrate the logistical complexity of post-publication inquiries, which must cross time zones, languages, and institutional systems to reach authors who may have moved on from the work.

The broader lesson of this case extends to everyone who consumes medical literature. Retractions are not signs of a broken system; they are the system working as designed, however slowly and imperfectly. A reader who encounters a review of phage therapy in blood cancers should now check its status, and the tools for doing so, from Crossmark badges to Retraction Watch databases to publisher notices, are increasingly accessible. For a field like phage therapy, which is moving from case reports toward formal clinical trials and which depends on clinician trust to recruit patients into those trials, the credibility of the secondary literature is not a luxury. The retraction of this review removes an unreliable synthesis from circulation, and in doing so it protects, rather than diminishes, the evidentiary foundation on which the future of phage therapy in hematologic malignancies will have to be built.

Subject of Research: Retraction of a review article on phage therapy and the microbiome in hematologic malignancies

Article Title: Retraction Note: Phage therapy and the microbiome in hematologic malignancies: opportunities, mechanisms, and early evidence

Article References: Retraction Note: Phage therapy and the microbiome in hematologic malignancies: opportunities, mechanisms, and early evidence. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00432-026-06623-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00432-026-06623-5

Keywords: phage therapy, microbiome, hematologic malignancies, retraction, research integrity, bacteriophages, antimicrobial resistance, citation irregularities, oncology, Springer Nature, peer review, publication ethics