Researchers escalated concerns about image manipulation in antibody validation data after OXB scientist Sholto David flagged suspicious western blot results on Thermo Fisher Scientific’s vendor sites. The issues expanded as other scientists and Reese Richardson at Northwestern University documented patterns across validation images. A growing repository, maintained with OXB and Richardson’s team, reportedly catalogs hundreds of suspect validation images, including many attributed to Thermo Fisher. The controversy is triggering customer distrust and calls for stronger validation transparency and auditing practices by antibody distributors.