Alzheimer’s scientists and falsified data

Alzheimer’s scientist indicted for allegedly falsifying data in $16M scheme

A federal grand jury has indicted an embattled Alzheimer's researcher for allegedly falsifying data to fraudulently obtain $16 million in federal research funding from the National Institutes of Health for the development of a controversial Alzheimer's drug and diagnostic test.

In 2023, Science magazine obtained a 50-page report from an internal investigation at CUNY that looked into 31 misconduct allegations made against Wang in 2021. According to the report, the investigating committee "found evidence highly suggestive of deliberate scientific misconduct by Wang for 14 of the 31 allegations," the report states. The allegations largely centered around doctored and fabricated images from Western blotting, an analytical technique used to separate and detect proteins. However, the committee couldn't conclusively prove the images were falsified "due to the failure of Dr. Wang to provide underlying, original data or research records and the low quality of the published images that had to be examined in their place."

In all, the investigation "revealed long-standing and egregious misconduct in data management and record keeping by Dr. Wang," and concluded that "the integrity of Dr. Wang’s work remains highly questionable." The committee also concluded that Cassava's lead scientist on its Alzheimer’s disease program, Lindsay Burns, who was a frequent co-author with Wang, also likely bears some responsibility for the misconduct.

In March 2022, five of Wang's articles published in the journal PLOS One were retracted over integrity concerns with images in the papers. Other papers by Wang have also been retracted or had statements of concern attached to them
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https://arstechnica.com/science/202...-for-allegedly-falsifying-data-in-16m-scheme/

 

Thread about another recent Alzheimer's falsified data story: Researchers plan to retract landmark Alzheimer’s paper containing doctored images

 

It will be interesting to see what happens to the share price of Cassava Sciences.

I also imagine that the indictment of Dr Wang must be worrisome news for Sylvain Lesné, the first author of the “landmark” paper on amyloid beta 56 in Alzheimer’s published in Science in 2006 that was found to be doctored in 2022 by data sleuths, as he might face the same fate.

 

And another Alzheimer's researcher:

Science: "Scores of papers by Eliezer Masliah, prominent neuroscientist and top NIH official, fall under suspicion"

"In 2016, when the U.S. Congress unleashed a flood of new funding for Alzheimer’s disease research, the National Institute on Aging (NIA) tapped veteran brain researcher Eliezer Masliah as a key leader for the effort."

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"But over the past 2 years questions have arisen about some of Masliah’s research. A Science investigation has now found that scores of his lab studies at UCSD and NIA are riddled with apparently falsified Western blots—images used to show the presence of proteins—and micrographs of brain tissue. Numerous images seem to have been inappropriately reused within and across papers, sometimes published years apart in different journals, describing divergent experimental conditions.

After Science brought initial concerns about Masliah’s work to their attention, a neuroscientist and forensic analysts specializing in scientific work who had previously worked with Science produced a 300-page dossier revealing a steady stream of suspect images between 1997 and 2023 in 132 of his published research papers. (Science did not pay them for their work.) “In our opinion, this pattern of anomalous data raises a credible concern for research misconduct and calls into question a remarkably large body of scientific work,” they concluded."

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"The dossier challenges far more studies than the two cited in NIH’s statement, including many that underpin the development and testing of experimental drugs (see sidebar). Masliah’s work, for example, helped win a nod from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical trials of an antibody called prasinezumab for Parkinson’s. Made by Prothena—a company backed by big money—the drug is intended to attack alpha-synuclein, whose build up in the brain has been linked to the condition’s debilitating physical and cognitive symptoms.

But in a trial of 316 Parkinson’s patients, reported in 2022 in The New England Journal of Medicine, prasinezumab showed no benefit compared with a placebo. And volunteers given infusions of the antibody suffered from far more side effects such as nausea and headaches than those in a placebo group who received sham infusions. Prothena is now collaborating in another trial of the drug candidate involving 586 Parkinson’s patients."

 

Merged thread

Neuroscientist Eliezer Masliah found to engage in scientific misconduct; 132 of his papers fall under suspicion

This is bad. Article is worth reading.

https://www.science.org/content/art...entist-eliezer-masliah-papers-under-suspicion

 

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/fraud-so-much-fraud

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1839440909114753034


These fabricated papers have collectively accrued over 180,000 citations, exerting a gigantic influence on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s research. Much of the research pipeline may be resting on a house of cards.

You should read the Science article because this is a really bad situation.

 

How odd that a neglected crisis, for which nothing was done to even reduce, continues to do the thing crises do.

Even with the lack of ideological denial, this is fundamentally the same crisis we face. It's not about replicability, it's about validity. None of this would be happening to us or in Alzheimer's research if academia were actually self-correcting, rather than using the pretense that they are as a cover for malfeasance like this and the kind we see in biopsychosocial junk.

Imagine the scale of the crisis if suspension of disbelief were lifted about the utterly disastrous state of evidence-based medicine. It's so much worse than doctored images and it doesn't just impede the progress of science, although it definitely does, but it has real-life impacts on billions of people, and has been the subject of hundreds of millions of complaints that are never taken into account, rarely even recorded.

I read a thread yesterday from a MD describing the state of health care in Alberta (a Canadian province), and why they were quitting their practice. Their work conditions are really horrible and unfit for most purposes. Health care everywhere is in a major crisis, from basic service provisioning all the way to fraud like this. But almost no one in the industry seems able to even nudge it away from the wrong direction, let alone steer it in the right one. IMO this has lead to health care falling so much compared to the rest of our civilization that aside from politics, health care is pretty much the thing we do the worst. For sure nothing else has a lower bottom of quality and failure. And it's both because the rest is progressing continuously and because health care is falling behind.

But there is no fix here. Health care is regulated and handled by governments, but it's never an electoral issue. Not really. It's always a topic during elections, but there is no actual way for politics to change things, there is no accountability and it's a completely opaque system. Too many polities don't even have real election competition, they're always managed by the same party who then have zero incentives to do anything. But this is a global problem, it's not as if local solutions are available here.