ON THE HEELS of an uproar concerning the inclusion of inappropriate data in a federally funded breast cancer treatment study, two medical centers in a nationwide multicenter study of the treatment of ocular melanoma are under investigation for misrepresenting data in their study, the Collaborative Ocular Melanoma Study (COMS).
The two institutions, out of the total of 43 participating centers, are Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago, Ill, and the Cleveland (Ohio) Clinic Foundation. The COMS is supported by the National Eye Institute (NEI), part of the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md. It compares the survival of patients with choroidal melanoma treated in two different ways.
Precisely what the misrepresentations amount to is unknown pending a report from the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) of the Department of Health and Human Services, which is conducting an investigation into the situation. However, the errors are believed to involve alterations in patient