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Laura Beale
Things were not going well for Serhat Kamrukchoo. In the summer of 2023, the man who carried out the abduction and execution of Gregory Davis had pleaded guilty in a plot that law enforcement said Serhat had masterminded. And the biotech company Serhat helped found, Enochian Biosciences, the one that prosecutors claim was part of his motivation for the hit, A was failing. The company, once valued at over half a billion dollars, was hemorrhaging money they desperately needed to make a change. That's when one of the co founders of Enochian, Renee Sendliev, and the CEO, Mark Deibel, began a series of conversations with a health startup that they believed could brighten their prospects. The company was called Jeticube and it was valued at over $200 million despite the fact that it had generated no revenue. The two companies began the process of merging and in August, Enochian changed its name to Renovaro Biosciences. The plan seemed to work immediately. Their stock went up. There was just one problem. Sarah's husband, William Anderson Wittekind, decided to throw a massive wrench into the gears. In January, he filed a lawsuit filled with explosive allegations about how Enochian was operating behind the scenes. If it succeeds, it could take down the board of directors. But it also seems to threaten the entire company.
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Laura Beale
From wonder. I'm Laura Beale and this is a special episode of Dr. Death. Bad magic. When Saerhat's husband filed his lawsuit, one of the people watching was Nate Anderson. Nate and his team at Hindenburg Research are responsible for the financial fraud investigation that exposed Serhat's true origins. Today, he's going to talk us through the latest chapter in the Enochian story. An insider alleging insider trading, boardroom backstabbing and major cover ups. Nate, first off, thanks for being here and talking with us about this suit. Can you start off by just briefly describing it for me?
Nate Anderson
Yeah. The lawsuit was filed by Serhat's husband and an entity that he has a stake in that owns a lot of shares of what once was called Enochian Biosciences. So it's A lawsuit where they are accusing the company of fraud, Accusing the company of failing to disclose key information to investors and demanding that Rene Sinlev, the chairman, Mark Deibel, the CEO and other insiders give money back to the company that the lawsuit alleges was unjustly stolen, essentially. And this basically to me reads like a spite lawsuit, in my view. It's 108 pages of Serhat through his husband saying, you sued me last year, calling me a brazen fraud. Why don't you guys take a look at yourselves?
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
It's just. I looked at it and there's just such irony. I mean, he's accusing the other side of fraud. I just. When I first heard about this, I was like, it's what?
Nate Anderson
Yeah, no, I mean.
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
I mean, what was your reaction? What was your reaction?
Nate Anderson
I think Sirha is sitting. Sitting in prison waiting for his trial for wire fraud now and the murder conspiracy. And I think he was probably pretty pissed that the company sued him and essentially tried to blame everything on him. So I think he's just trying to say, no, you guys are also scumbags and a lot of this is your fault. And you were there and you were involved. And here's a bunch of evidence showing how you guys were enriching yourselves at the expense of shareholders and sort of harnessing lies and his own claims to make money for themselves.
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
Do you think the company itself is endangered by this suit?
Nate Anderson
I think the company is endangered by the prospect that the major merger announcement is in all likelihood completely worthless, that they have virtually nothing left. So I think the company is in danger. The lawsuit, I think, helps bring that closer to fruition. But I think that's likely an inevitability at this point.
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
So if they still own a big share of the stock, why would they do something that would hurt the company? Because if the stock goes up, then presumably they make money. So I'm confused by this. Can you explain it to me?
Nate Anderson
Yeah, I think part of it is an allegation that the insiders were buying shares at a massive discount ahead of major news that they knew was going to send the stock up. There was one example where Rene Sinlev, the chairman of the company, bought stock just days before the company announced a major merger transaction with a AI company. And that transaction announcement sent the stock up over 1000% over the course of months from its low prices. So with the chairman buying shares immediately prior to the transaction with clear knowledge that was going to be announced, the allegation is that he basically enriched himself at the company's expense using this material, non public information that he had. That's a pretty serious allegation.
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
But wouldn't Serhat and his husband have
Laura Beale
also made money off the stock? Like if the whole company implodes, then nobody wins, right?
Nate Anderson
That's right, yeah. So I do think to an extent this is probably cutting his nose off, despite his face.
Laura Beale
So you mentioned Mark Deibel and his
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
name comes up over and over again in the suit. We covered this some in the podcast. But at first he's a big defender of Sarah Hut and then it ends up they're suing each other. Can you kind of walk me through just briefly, the arc of their relationship?
Nate Anderson
Yeah. So at first Mark Dibel and the company for that matter, had just lavished praise on Sirhat, that he was going to revolutionize medicine, that he was the Michelangelo of biotech and things of that sort. So for years had just been lavishing this praise on him. But then when everything came crumbling down, I think they, they chose to try and pin the blame on Serhat. Serhat is in jail and I think they. The lawsuit that they filed, this was in October 2022, seemed like an effort to allege that Serhat was the brazen fraud, that he had faked all the data, that he was responsible for all these terrible things that had happened.
Laura Beale
It doesn't seem unreasonable knowing what now.
Nate Anderson
No, I think it's probably the case. I think Sirhat is indeed a brazen fraud. But that doesn't mean Mark Dibel and Rene Sinlev aren't in a lot of white collar cases. The defense for everyone else who's not the kind of key individual is almost always the play dumb defense. Like, oh, we didn't know that data was all fake. We didn't know our key shareholder and co founder was a psycho murder magician out there, like casting spells or whatever and giving quack remedies to terminal cancer patients. I genuinely don't know what the justification they landed on for all this was, but I think the game is they are pretending more or less to be stone cold morons about everything that just had no idea what was going on. And I think Serhat recognized that through the lawsuit. It's like, okay, these guys are trying to pin it all on me. And it wasn't all on me either alleging that they knew or that they themselves were engaged in some sketchy practices that resulted in where the company is today.
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
So it centers around the acquisition of this company. Can you just briefly walk me through how they acquired that company and what the lawsuit is saying about the problems
Laura Beale
in the acquisition of the company.
Nate Anderson
Oh my gosh. Yeah. All right, let me give it a shot at least.
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
Thanks.
Nate Anderson
Around mid 2023, Enochian Biosciences was in pretty dire straits, almost out of cash, had a world of liabilities. It was really close to being just an insolvent shell with tons of legal liabilities through the revelations around Sirha, the faking of the scientific data, and a lot of just misst statements and things along the way. So company was in pretty dark times. And around middle of 2023, the chairman, Rene Sinlev began talks to merge with a company called Jedi Cube or Getty Cube or however it's pronounced. And the company, from what we can tell, didn't actually exist until it was formed in June. And all they had around that time was an agreement to merge or acquire with a tiny little startup that had what they claimed to be some AI technology. And from what we can tell, that tiny little startup itself was almost insolvent. So it didn't seem like it was a match made in heaven. But this Jedi Cube acquired this small startup and then the deal was for Jedi Cube to merge with Enochian and rebrand and renew itself as a totally new AI MedTech hot company. And that is exactly what happened. The stock went up, changed its name to Renovaro Biosciences. Bunch of people bought it. Anything that can hype up this like new pivot to AI and get investors excited, I think is what they were gravitating to.
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
And I know you're not an attorney, but you spend a lot of time looking up dirt on companies. I'd like your kind of general impression about whether this seems like a strong case or not.
Nate Anderson
As much as I feel weird agreeing with Sirhat on something, I think the evidence here seems quite strong and well documented. I think there's quite a bit here.
Laura Beale
So are you going to keep on. I'm curious, are you done?
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
Are you going to keep on popping popcorn and following this or are you just an observer now?
Nate Anderson
No, we're going to follow the story. I want to see what happens with Serhat's trial. He is a pretty talented magician and illusionist. Can he fool a jury? I'm curious to see what happens with Mark Dybel and Renee Sinlev, like two individuals that despite everything, have come out thus far relatively unscathed and have just slapped a new name on what they're doing and tried to do it all over again in not much more convincing fashion than the last time they tried this.
Laura Beale
I think That's a good place to end.
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
Thanks, Nate.
Laura Beale
It was nice to talk to you. Fascinating.
Nate Anderson
I appreciate it. Thank you. All right.
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
Thanks a lot.
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Laura Beale
After Hindenburg research exposed that Enochian's scientific founder had faked all of his criticism credentials, the company stood by the science. But in 2022, they dial that back. Five months after Serhat's arrest, they admitted that he had actually faked some of the scientific data in his papers. Elizabeth Bick is a scientific fraud researcher and she was one of the earliest people to notice the inconsistencies in Serhat's research. She's here to talk about how those papers got published in the first place and how scientific fraud can slip under the radar.
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
Thank you Elizabeth, for talking with me. I have to say I'm a fan. I'm very familiar with the work that you do, so I'm really happy to talk to you. When I first started out in science writing, I was a little more naive. I had this view of the peer review system as being the fail safe against any of this happening. That of course when scientific papers are read by other people in the field, their job is to make sure that the science is sound and keep this kind of thing from happening. What's the reality of that?
Elizabeth Bick
Oh yeah, it's a tough question to
answer because some of the things I'm finding you wish that a peer reviewer would have seen that. And because sometimes it's so obvious, such the photoshopping is so, you know, obvious that somebody should have caught that. But the truth is that peer reviewers are, well, it's a volunteer job, you know, people peer reviewing typically will do this on a Friday evening and when the rest of the family is doing some fun, something fun, they're still peer reviewing. And so scientists are doing this unpaid, as a volunteer job, and they're not really educated on catching fraud. That's not really the purpose of peer review. It is, is, is the science good. And if you assume that data is real, if you just trust that blindly, then that is a very different way of looking at the data than if you put a different hat on and think, could this be fraud? And so that is how I approach some of the papers. So similarly, I feel that the fraud detection, looking for specific problems with papers should be done by paid persons who work at publishers or journals.
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
Yeah.
Laura Beale
And speaking about the larger scientific community, I don't want anyone hearing this to
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
think that this is rampant, that most of scientific research out there is fake or fraud. So can you give me some context in terms of the percentage of papers that you review that actually do have problems?
Elizabeth Bick
So I did a scan of 20,000 papers and I found that around 2% of those papers had really big problems that were not the result of an honest error, but were the result of an intention to mislead. And so that's 2%. And those were obvious problems by looking at the paper. So the real percentage of fraud has
to be a bit higher, but I
would estimate it maybe in the 5% range.
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
So what's the answer then to keeping the fraudsters out of science? Do we need more scientist turned detective like you, or is there some better system? I'm intrigued by your idea of having a whole fraud department at a journal, but again, I don't know if that's feasible. But if you had a magic wand, how would you fix this?
Elizabeth Bick
We would hope to have more consequences for people who are caught doing fraud. But the problem is now we also have these professional scammers, which we call paper mills, which are networks of people making money selling completely fake papers to authors who need to publish a paper. And you can find these advertisements very openly, for example, on Facebook, groups, and there's whole networks of people where they advertise. Do you need an authorship on a paper? And give us some money and we'll give you a paper. And there's hundreds and hundreds of advertisements, probably even thousands.
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
How much does it cost? If I'm desperate and I gotta publish a paper, how much do I have to shell out for a fake scientific paper?
Elizabeth Bick
Well, do you want to be a first author, second author, or third author? Because, you know, first author.
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
So there are tiers of tears.
Elizabeth Bick
They're tears, yes. It depends. Like, I've seen $5,000. I've also seen 500. I guess it depends on the quality of the paper, but a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand dollars.
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
Yes, but even then this paper has to get past peer review.
Elizabeth Bick
Yeah, but it gets like they, these paper mills seem to target specific journals. And again, this is very similar to a credit card fraud where they first try $1. Oh, okay, that worked. Okay, let's now do a bigger amount. And so they try first one paper and if that gets accepted, then they will target that specific journal and send in more. And it seems that some journals are even in the loop and are willing to accept these papers. So it's low quality journals that accept this in general and they will look the other way and maybe even get kickback from the paper mills where the editor might get some money if they accept the papers.
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
Wow. So I want to move to the particular situation that we talked about in this particular season of Dr. Death. I don't think Sarah had like went out and bought a paper, but if you could, I would like to talk about the fraud and the retraction of papers in this particular instance. This was not the first that you'd heard about Enochian. And Sarah, tell me how you first heard about this particular situation.
Elizabeth Bick
I think I was contacted by a journalist asking me if I heard the story about the founder. And they asked me if I had heard about it and if I could look into their papers. And so there's two posters by Enochian Biosciences scientific posters presented at two different conferences. And these posters are sort of like science posters at a high school science fair. And they're about two different topics. In one one, they use their magic technique to cure mice of hepatitis B infection. And in the second poster they use their magic technique to cure mice of COVID 19 infection. And so these are very different experiments. And yet one of the mouse is exactly the same photo on both posters. And so there's another problem. In some of the papers that Sehrat has published, he doesn't disclose his conflict of interest. So as a scientist, when you write a scientific paper and you're funded by a particular interest group or maybe you work for a company, there's a financial advantage that you might have of publishing. He works and he has founded Enochian Biosciences. And there's another co author who works at UCLA who also is listed. And both of them have patents that are very relevant to the topic of these papers, but they don't disclose them. And so he either forgot to include that statement, which is very unlikely because the Journal will ask you, what is your conflict of statement? And he actually said, no, there's no conflict of interest. And that seemed to be not completely true.
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
Yeah, you'd think that would be something he wouldn't forget. Do you have any thoughts about the actual cure strategies that he talks about?
Elizabeth Bick
So there's another problem in some of the papers in which he describes this therapy to treat patients who have some viral infection with another virus. And I think it's to distract the immune system. So in this paper they described this technique and they described two different patients who were magically cured with this super infection strategy. So one is a COVID 19 patient who was treated with this superinfection six days after their COVID 19 patient symptoms started. And then he got better. But I don't know, I've had Covid twice actually. And you know, most of the times you recover. If you're generally healthy, you will recover within a week. So he started on day six and he got better. Well, you know, he could have used chocolate pudding and he would have gotten better like that is. That seems to be not a very convincing evidence that the strategy of the superinfection works.
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
Yes. Well, based on what you saw, do you think he just made some mistakes
Laura Beale
and the science is real, or do
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
you think the whole thing is just made up?
Elizabeth Bick
I'm not sure if the science of Enochian biosciences is real or not, based on what I see of lack of disclosure, of conflict of interest, a reused image of a mouse, some other images, posters that appear to have reused images that have passed on for different experiments. I'm very skeptical, but I think a lot of people want to believe in some magic cure for all kinds of diseases.
Laura Beale
Why do you think that is?
Elizabeth Bick
If you have a patient who has some severe disease, maybe cancer or severe infection, they will try whatever is offered to them in the hopes it will cure them. And we all would be if we were in that situation. You just grab any chance that people offer to you because as humans, we want to believe in these success stories. And that is the reason why a lot of people who are perhaps charming, who have the right attitude to convince other people they can pull that off.
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
Yeah, that's kind of a universal quality to the doctors that we've covered in this series and even other doctors I've written about who, who take advantage of people, and they seem to have a lot of bedside manner and charm. And sadly, in so many cases, the patients are facing death or serious health consequences.
Laura Beale
And then these men step in with promises to save them.
Elizabeth Bick
And it's also such an easy choice in a way to do experiments on people who are going to die anyways because if the treatment didn't work, they're not going to complain, right?
Mm.
Interviewer (possibly Russell Finch or Heather Baloga)
Well, I just want to thank you for the work that you do to try to hold to account people who take advantage of the system. And I also want to thank you for spending time talking with us.
Elizabeth Bick
Yeah, you're very welcome.
It was my pleasure to be here and to be talking about this topic.
Laura Beale
Listen to Dr. Death the Cowboy on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of doctor the Cowboy early and ad free right now, join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.
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Laura Beale
From Wondery this is a special episode of Dr. Bad Magic. I'm your host Laura Beale. Producer is Nikka Singh Senior producer is Russell Finch Senior editor is Rachel B. Doyle Fact checking by Jacqueline Colletti Sound design and mixing by Jay Rothman Senior managing producer is Lata Pandya Coordinating producer is Heather Baloga Produced by Storyforce Executive Producer are Bly Pagan Faust and Corey Shepard Stern for Storyforce. Our executive producers are George Lavender, Marshall Louis and Jen Sargent for Wondery.
Host: Laura Beale
Notable Guests: Nate Anderson (Hindenburg Research), Dr. Elizabeth Bik (Scientific Fraud Researcher)
This special episode delves into the explosive aftermath of fraud allegations swirling around Enochian Biosciences and its disgraced co-founder, Serhat Gumrukcu. After a lawsuit filed by Serhat's husband levels accusations of insider trading, fraud, and corporate malfeasance, the show's team explores the chaotic infighting, boardroom betrayals, and the wider implications of scientific fraud in biotechnology. The episode features investigative insight from Nate Anderson of Hindenburg Research, whose work was pivotal in exposing the company’s dark secrets, and from Dr. Elizabeth Bik, one of the foremost experts on scientific misconduct.
[00:06–12:35]
[07:01–08:58]
[16:18–27:12]
[19:36–21:55]
This episode of Dr. Death offers an incisive look at how corporate ambition, personal vendettas, and scientific fraud conspire to create chaos—and sometimes catastrophe—in the emerging biotech sector. Through in-depth discussion with expert investigators, it sheds light not just on individual malfeasance, but on the systemic vulnerabilities that let fraud fester. And it reminds us that when hope overrides skepticism, even scientific miracles can turn deadly.