For three years, nine months, and one week, Ram Sasisekharan lived under a gag order. In 2019, some of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor’s peers publicly accused his lab of falsifying research, setting in motion a lengthy internal investigation that sidelined his work, decimated his team, and barred him from speaking out in his own defense.
“The feeling was that we were guilty of something until we were proven innocent,” Sasisekharan, a decorated scientist whose work helped launch six biotech companies, said in an interview with STAT. “There were times I would wake up wondering if it had all been a nightmare.”
The charge was that Sasisekharan and his colleagues committed the age-old academic sin of copying someone else’s work and passing it off as their own. MIT mounted an internal review of the allegations, and school policy mandated that all parties keep the whole thing confidential. In normal circumstances, that would have kept the proceedings within the school’s walls. But because Sasisekharan’s accusers published their allegations in a scientific journal, albeit a niche one, he could only sit in silence amid a public conversation over whether he was a fraud.
In March, some closure finally came in the form of an internal email, from MIT’s vice president for research, declaring that the investigation had concluded “with no finding of research misconduct for any of the submitted allegations.” The message, made public at Sasisekharan’s request, ended by thanking him for keeping “the difficult commitment to maintain the confidentiality of the review.” He was now free to say what he couldn’t in 2019 — and to begin rebuilding a reputation blighted by years of presumed guilt.
“I’ve been through a negative journey, and I want something good to come out of this,” Sasisekharan said. “What were the mistakes made? And how do we make it so that the collateral damage on people we train can be avoided? These are some hard questions that we have to deal with, and I’m committed to that.”
He won’t be getting further apology, or even much of an explanation. All but one of Sasisekharan’s accusers did not respond to requests for comment from STAT. The one who did, Dartmouth College professor Tillman Gerngross, said only that he and his colleagues stand by their allegations. Three of Sasisekharan’s academic peers who previously endorsed the accusations also didn’t respond to questions from STAT. Janice Reichert, editor of the journal that published the allegations, declined to be interviewed. A spokesperson for MIT said the school had no comment beyond the March email and would not make Maria Zuber, vice president for research and author of the exonerating message, available for an interview.
The whole affair boils down to two one-sided stories, playing out four years apart. In the first, Gerngross and his colleagues publicly made their case that Sasisekharan’s lab took the recipes for two existing therapeutic antibodies, one for Zika virus and one for influenza, and made some cosmetic changes before claiming them as original inventions — allegations to which Sasisekharan could not respond. In the second, Sasisekharan has posted a detailed defense of his work, addressing each evidentiary point, and his accusers have chosen not to weigh in.
In the middle is a mysteriously lengthy MIT investigation. In 2019, when ties between MIT and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein came to light, the school mounted an internal investigation that took just four months to produce a 61-page report. The fact that MIT spent 10 times as long adjudicating an academic dispute is baffling to some of Sasisekharan’s colleagues. Further complicating matters is the fact that one of his accusers, Dane Wittrup, works in the same department, with a lab of his own in the same MIT building.
“MIT just does not have a policy to deal with this,” said Peter Dedon, an MIT professor of biological engineering who has worked with both Sasisekharan and Wittrup. “We have policies for students who cheat, or when someone brings a gun to campus. But we don’t have a policy for when one millionaire faculty member attacks another millionaire faculty member using the halls of MIT.”
For Rahul Raman, a scientist who has worked in Sasisekharan’s lab for nearly 25 years, the protracted investigation rattled his faith in MIT. From the outset, the school’s gag order made it impossible for lab members to talk to Sasisekharan about what was going on or mount a public defense of their own work, Raman said. They came to feel ostracized by their peers at MIT, he said, and feared their silence would be interpreted as guilt.
In a 2021 letter to MIT leadership, viewed by STAT, three members of Sasisekharan’s lab said “morale was at all-time low,” as postdoctoral researchers and graduate students were finding it difficult to get their work funded and published. Gradually, almost all of them parted ways with Sasisekharan for the sake of their careers. A lab that employed 18 people in 2018 was down to just three, including Sasisekharan, by 2023.
“Even though MIT has cleared us and the truth is now very clear, I’m not entirely sure if all the damage can be completely undone,” Raman said. “The public nature of the attack and how it created a bias — that is always in the corner of our minds as we try to march forward.”
Sasisekharan’s career derailment began May 20, 2019, when the journal mAbs published “Connecting the sequence dots: shedding light on the genesis of antibodies reported to be designed in silico.” In it, Gerngross, Wittrup, and three of their colleagues at the biotech company Adimab picked apart the Zika and influenza antibodies, each described in papers co-authored by Sasisekharan. The amino acid sequences were so similar to those of previously described antibodies that “we find it difficult to view these authors’ approach in any light other than an intent to mislead as to the level of originality and significance of the published work,” they wrote.
Sasisekharan was shocked, first at the allegations, which he said none of the authors brought to him personally before publication, and then at the involvement of Wittrup, his colleague of more than two decades.
“I was in a daze,” Sasisekharan said. “It was an ambush.”
Gerngross escalated the charges in a series of media interviews, saying that Adimab had looked at just two of Sasisekharan’s published discoveries and found damning irregularities, casting doubt on the scientist’s entire career. “To me, if you’re sitting in the kitchen and two fat cockroaches walk across the floor, what’s the chance that there’s only two?” Gerngross told STAT, a phrase that deeply offended members of Sasisekharan’s lab.
Sasisekharan sent a brief rebuttal to the press, calling the Adimab paper “inaccurate and slanderous,” founded on “a baseless conjecture and filled with entirely false claims.” Then he got to work on a detailed defense of the antibodies and the process used to discover them, he said.
A week later, Sasisekharan got called to a meeting with Tyler Jacks, head of MIT’s prestigious Koch Institute, for what he assumed would be a strategy session on how to combat the allegations. Instead, Jacks told him that MIT had received an internal complaint about his research, and the school would be mounting an investigation, Sasisekharan said. That meant, under policy 10.1.5, he could not speak to anyone about the matter until MIT deemed it to be resolved, and neither could his trainees and staff scientists.
“That was the hardest part of all of this,” Sasisekharan said. “Beyond the scientific discourse, this is over a decade of work by several people in the lab, and they felt they didn’t have a voice. They couldn’t defend themselves.”
Jacks did not respond to a request for comment.
From that point forward, Sasisekharan’s lab slipped into a holding pattern, with scientists trying to carry out their work as the weight of suspicion slowly strangled their ability to operate. In early 2020, the lab, which specialized in rapidly developing antibody medicines for emerging pathogens, could only watch as the world scrambled to find treatments for Covid-19.
“The frustration was that we were stymied during the biggest infectious disease outbreak of our lifetimes,” Raman said. “I still think about what we could have accomplished if we were fully functional during what was already a very difficult time for the world.”
Adimab was not similarly constrained. In July 2020, when Covid-19 vaccines were still in clinical development, Gerngross and his colleagues launched a spinout called Adagio Therapeutics, raising $50 million in venture capital to develop therapeutic antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. Unlike the antibodies then in the works from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Eli Lilly, Adagio’s medicine would bind to multiple spots on the surface of the virus, Gerngross said, which would ensure the drug would work even if SARS-CoV-2 mutated and provide protection against future coronaviruses.
“If you look at coronaviruses, they’ve spilled over into human populations three times over the last two decades,” Gerngross told STAT in 2020, citing the outbreaks of SARS, MERS, and SARS-CoV-2. “How likely is it that there will be another coronavirus pandemic in the next 10 years? Twenty years? I don’t think it’s a question of if, but of when.”
A year later, Adagio raised more than $300 million in an initial public offering on the strength of early clinical data on its first antibody treatment, valuing the company at about $2 billion. By September 2021, Adagio’s stock price had more than doubled on data suggesting its antibody, called ADG20, was indeed more resilient than the competition.
Then came Omicron, which would lead the paths of Gerngross and Sasisekharan back together. Around Thanksgiving, scientists in South Africa identified a new SARS-CoV-2 variant with a worrying series of mutations that allowed it to escape immunity to Covid-19, whether from vaccination or the administration of antibody treatments. Medicines from Lilly and Regeneron, by this point in wide use, appeared to be becoming obsolete.
But not ADG20, according to Adagio. On Nov. 29, the company issued a press release saying that its antibody binds to a site on the SARS-CoV-2 virus that had not yet mutated, meaning “ADG20 will retain neutralizing activity against the Omicron variant, whereas other mAb products may lose substantial activity against this variant.” The company’s share price rose 80% on the announcement, giving it a roughly $5 billion valuation.
Back at MIT, Sasisekharan’s lab, however weakened, was doing its own work on Omicron — and coming to a starkly different conclusion. In a paper uploaded to a preprint server Dec. 8, Sasisekharan, Raman, and the two remaining members of their lab analyzed the structure of Omicron and concluded that its mutations would directly scuttle the efficacy of the Lilly and Regeneron antibodies and, due to a complicated biological chain reaction, indirectly make Adagio’s treatment substantially weaker.
A week later, Adagio came to the same conclusion. Lab tests of ADG20 revealed it was 300-fold less potent against Omicron than it was against the original strain of SARS-CoV-2, the company said in a press release. While Omicron’s individual mutations didn’t seem poised nullify the antibody’s effects, “new data show that the combination of mutations present in the Omicron spike protein led to a reduction in ADG20 neutralization that was not suggested by prior data,” Gerngross said in a statement, echoing the findings of Sasisekharan’s lab.
Adagio’s about-face decimated its stock price and set in motion shareholder lawsuits. Gerngross resigned from his role as CEO in early 2022, after which the Peter Thiel-founded venture fund Mithril Capital ran a successful campaign to overhaul the company’s board. In September, Adagio changed its name to Invivyd.
By March 2023, when MIT publicly exonerated Sasisekharan, all of Gerngross’ co-founders had left Invivyd, and the company traded for about $1.50 per share.
To Paul Schimmel, a Scripps Research chemistry professor who counts both Sasisekharan and Gerngross as friends, the whole affair exposes a failure in academic policy. MIT had no control over Gerngross’ public statements during its investigation, but there’s no clear reason it needed nearly four years to come to a conclusion, he said.
“Things like this should be dealt with immediately so that faculty and postdocs and grad students don’t have this sense every time they go before a group that there’s a cloud over them,” Schimmel said. “I hope that’s the main lesson that’s learned here: The time frame is not acceptable.”
Sasisekharan, now out from under MIT’s cone of silence, declined to weigh in on the fate of Adagio, citing a preference “not to engage in negative things.” His focus now is putting his lab back together, he said, and on advocating for policy changes that might stop internal inquiries from derailing academic careers.
“What if this had happened to junior faculty?” Sasisekharan said. “Are they equipped to deal with this? It’s uncharted territory, and people don’t know how to talk about it.”
MIT’s leadership privately acknowledged that the investigation should not have taken so long, Sasisekharan said, but he would not go into details of how the process unfolded, pointing to the school’s confidentiality policy. MIT apologized for the damage done to his lab, Sasisekharan said, and committed to help him restore his reputation and rebuild his network of junior scientists.
“It’s a journey,” Sasisekharan said. “It’s not an overnight thing. It’s going to take some time.”
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