Take a deep breath first. These are chemical antibodies, not the kind that fight bacteria. But this is still really bad. https://reeserichardson.blog/2026/0...o-fishers-antibody-data-has-been-manipulated/ > Antibodies are near-ubiquitous but notoriously fickle laboratory reagents in biomedical research. For many applications, it is absolutely crucial that the antibodies that you use are selective (i.e., the antibody binds strongly to the target protein) and specific (i.e., the antibody binds to the protein of interest and little else). Commercially-available antibodies often fail to meet these criteria. Members of YCharOS, an independent antibody validation initiative, estimated in 2024 that “more than 50% of all antibodies failed in one or more applications”. Antibodies that don’t work as intended can delay experiments by weeks and non-specific antibodies are a massive source of irreproducibility in the biomedical literature. So you want to see a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_blot that shows the antibody will only react, and strongly react, with the protein(s) you expect it to react with. > Antibody vendors like Thermo Fisher (probably the largest laboratory reagent supplier in the world) put verification data in their catalogs to demonstrate to scientists that the product works as intended. While signs of manipulation in this verification data don’t necessarily imply that the antibodies in question don’t work as advertised, without reliable verification data available, scientists will have no way of knowing until they have actually purchased the antibody. > Sholto and I have now documented more than 100 images provided as verification data in Thermo Fisher’s antibody catalog that have apparently been manipulated. [Note: "apparently manipulated" means "blatantly copied and pasted desirable reaction strengths, or painted over unwanted reactions, in Photoshop" for those of us who aren't afraid of being sued.] You can see all of them at this Zenodo repository, which we’ll try to update regularly. This repository also contains a handful of instances that are less suggestive of manipulation, but the data is still problematic (e.g., the same image being presented as verification data for two different antibodies). https://cen.acs.org/articles/104/web/2026/05/Sleuths-say-Thermo-Fisher-doctored.html Instead of promising to look into the matter and review their procedures, and blaming it all on some nameless intern, Thermo Fisher responds with: > In the process of preparing antibody images for publication on our website, some images may have been adjusted to clarify for presentation purposes. Uh yikes? This has been going on since at least 2019. This is going to throw a LOT of research into doubt.
Update: more sketchy images have been found, including one from another company that is doctored with the dame background as some of Thermo Fisher's images. So it seems likely a third-party lab is the culprit.
https://reeserichardson.blog/2026/0...lling-antibodies-using-faked-validation-data/ The count is now over 18,000 faked images for 17,500 antibodies from 15 companies! Also, Thermo Fisher is actively lying by manufacturing quotations from scientific papers to say that their antibodies were used when the papers never said that.
