A prizewinning German study claiming to have found a safe and effective vaccine for kidney cancer has been heavily criticised by doctors who say that the research data may have been manipulated and that the treatment could even be dangerous.

Alexander Kugler, a senior registrar in the urology department of Göttingen University Hospital, and Gernot Stuhler, an oncologist from Tübingen University, treated 17 patients with metastasising kidney cancer with a vaccine made from a hybrid of cancer and immune cells. Their study, published in March last year, reported that after …