The U.S. Department of Justice has initiated an in-depth criminal investigation against a manufacturer of an Alzheimer’s drug due to allegations that the company falsified research data about the drug they make.
The investigation into Cassava Sciences, by federal prosecutors, centers around the allegation that the company knowingly defrauded investors, consumers, or government agencies, stated a report from Reuters.
The investigation has been initiated in the wake of a recent bombshell report that was published late last week via Science Magazine about how key images from one of the most heavily cited research papers regarding Alzheimer’s disease from this century could have been entirely intentionally fabricated, which would mean that hundreds of millions of dollars worth of taxpayer-funded research and years of work about the seventh leading cause of death in the United States could be invalidated.
One neuroscientist and physician at Vanderbilt University, Matthew Schrag, came across the worrying study while looking into an experimental drug for Alzheimer’s named Simufilam, which is made by Cassava Sciences.
Schrag was reached out to by an attorney that was looking into the drug on behalf of two prominent neuroscientists who have stated that some of the information about the drug was “fraudulent.”
The report put out in Science Magazine then redirects to how Schrag’s investigation into the drug eventually led him to look into a study from 2006 in Nature by Neuroscientist Sylvain Lesné of the University of Minnesota (UMN) that “underpins a key element of the dominant yet controversial amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer’s, which holds that [protein amyloid beta] Aβ clumps, known as plaques, in brain tissue are a primary cause of the devastating illness,” explained a report from Science.
Science looked into the study and claimed that it went along with Schrag’s suspicions concerning Lesné’s research with the assistance of top Alzheimer’s researchers and image analysts. The various independent experts alleged that quite a few of the images they were given to investigate were “shockingly blatant” examples of photo tampering.
The authors “appeared to have composed figures by piecing together parts of photos from different experiments,” explained one molecular biologist and well-known forensic image consultant, Elisabeth Bik, stated to the publication. “The obtained experimental results might not have been the desired results, and that data might have been changed to … better fit a hypothesis.”
The report highlighted that the implication of possible fraudulent work equates to hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) being wasted and that the entire scientific field could have been looking in the entirely wrong direction over the past 16 years for a cure to Alzheimer’s because a huge number of studies were based upon the initial study.