His lawsuit settled, one of the two feuding Temple heart scientists is retiring

Steven Houser, a prominent Temple University heart-disease scientist involved in a bitter research feud with longtime colleague Arthur Feldman, has settled a federal lawsuit against Feldman and the school, and is retiring in June.

Terms of the settlement were not disclosed. Houser had accused Feldman, a cardiologist, of stealing samples from his research on pigs, using them to secure funding for his startup company. Feldman denied it, saying Houser had authorized a graduate student to retrieve the material from a subzero freezer in a secure Temple laboratory. The samples came from the hearts of pigs in which researchers had induced heart attacks, using them as a model to study human disease.

Still unclear is the status of a university investigation into possible misconduct on more than a dozen studies on heart disease, at least nine of which were co-authored by Houser.

The tangled tale has been the talk of cardiovascular research circles, both for its level of acrimony and the prominence of those involved. Feldman is a former dean of Temple’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine, and Houser is a past president of the American Heart Association.

Christopher Ezold, an attorney representing Houser, declined to comment on the case other than to confirm the settlement, which was reached in January.

“The parties have reached an amicable resolution of the civil action,” he said.

The school is holding a June 14 retirement reception to honor Houser, who joined the faculty in 1979.

Temple’s internal investigation involves allegations that research images had been fabricated or duplicated to suggest that a potential heart-disease treatment was effective when it was not. The allegations were first raised on pubpeer.com, a website that allows scientists to make anonymous critiques of research.

In his lawsuit, Houser denied any misconduct, stating that for five of the studies, his involvement was limited to editing text written by a colleague for whom English was a second language. In other cases, he said, problems with images were the result of mistakes, which since had been corrected.

Houser contended the real reason for the investigation was Feldman. His lawsuit claims that his colleague urged Temple to investigate in retaliation for his complaints over the pig samples. Houser accused school officials of trying to intimidate him into dropping his complaints.

When asked for comment on the lawsuit and its investigation, the university provided this statement:

“Temple University reviews allegations of research misconduct in accordance with university policy and applicable regulations. Allegations of research misconduct are handled centrally through Temple’s Office of the Vice President for Research, and the university does not comment on internal investigations or personnel issues. Ordinarily, Temple also does not comment on litigation, however we can confirm this matter has been resolved.”

In legal filings, Feldman has denied any wrongdoing. He disputed Houser’s allegation that he stole the pig samples, contending instead that Houser had agreed to share them. Feldman said he also offered his colleague the chance to purchase shares in his startup company, Renovacor, and that Houser declined the offer.

Renovacor was acquired by Rocket Pharmaceuticals in December. The protein that Feldman studied in Houser’s pig samples, called BAG3, is among several potential targets for which the company is exploring the use of gene therapy.

In his more than four decades at Temple, Houser studied how calcium regulates the beating of individual heart cells, and he also studied the potential for using stem cells to regenerate damaged heart tissue.

In a 2014 interview with the journal Circulation Research, Houser was asked for the best advice anyone had given him. He replied:

“When you get knocked down, get back up. Science is a business with lots of negative feedback. Our papers get rejected, our grants get rejected, people say bad things about our ideas. So I tell people they have to be willing to get back up when they get knocked down, and to not let their life be defined by the way they got knocked down — let it be defined by the way they get back up.”