A federal grand jury has reportedly indicted Hoau-Yan Wang, 67, a professor of medicine at the City University of New York, on charges of falsifying data to fraudulently obtain $16 million in federal research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the development of a controversial Alzheimer’s disease drug and diagnostic test.
Ars Technical Reports The indictment marks a significant development in the ongoing debate over Alzheimer’s research and drug development. Wang, a paid collaborator for the Austin, Texas-based pharmaceutical company Cassava Sciences, is accused of manipulating data and images to secure research funding for Cassava’s experimental Alzheimer’s treatment simufilam, which is currently in Phase 3 clinical trials.
The small molecule drug simufilam is being touted by Cassava as a potential breakthrough for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. The company claims that the drug could restore the structure and function of scaffolding proteins in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, slowing cognitive decline. However, the scientific community has long had doubts and concerns about the research on which these claims are based.
The charges against Wang are particularly severe. According to the indictment, he is accused of falsifying scientific research results by manipulating data and images from Western blots, a technique for separating and detecting proteins. The charges include artificially adding or deleting protein bands, or changing their thickness or darkness, to support predetermined conclusions.
In 2023, an internal CUNY investigation looked into 31 allegations of misconduct made against Wang in 2021. The investigative committee found evidence “strongly suggestive of deliberate scientific misconduct” in 14 of those allegations. The report concluded that “the integrity of Dr. Wang’s research remains highly questionable” and uncovered “long-standing, egregious misconduct in data management and record-keeping.”
The impact of Wang’s misconduct allegations has been far-reaching: in March 2022, five of his papers published in PLOS One were retracted due to concerns about the integrity of images in the papers. Other of Wang’s publications have also been retracted or have statements of concern attached to them.
Breitbart News reported on much of the data falsification surrounding Alzheimer’s research, writing in 2022:
Vanderbilt University neuroscientist Matthew Schrag shocked the Alzheimer’s research community when he launched an investigation to discredit one of the seminal Alzheimer’s studies, a 2006 study that served as the basis for many subsequent studies. Last Thursday, Science magazine brought the scandal to public attention by concluding that some of the visual evidence in the 2006 study had been deliberately altered, marking the beginning of what may become one of the worst cases of scientific misconduct in history.
This groundbreaking study was published in Nature magazine in 2006 by neuroscientist and University of Minnesota associate professor Sylvain Reznais. To make a very long and complicated story short, Reznais claimed to have isolated a protein that caused memory loss by creating plaque deposits in the brains of rats.
Further complicating matters, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) conducted an inspection of the analytical procedures and techniques Wang used to analyze the blood and cerebrospinal fluid of patients in the simufilam clinical trials in September 2022. The investigation uncovered a number of serious problems. Science magazine.
The charges against Wang are serious – one count of felony fraud against the United States, two counts of wire fraud and one count of making false statements – and if convicted, he could face up to 10 years in prison for the felony fraud count, up to 20 years for each count of wire fraud and up to five years for the false statements count.
In response to the indictment, Cassava Sciences distanced itself from Wang, calling him a “former” scientific advisor. The company said the grants at the center of the indictment related to the early development stages of the company’s drug candidates and diagnostic tests. The company stressed that Wang was not involved in the Phase 3 clinical trial of simufilam, which is estimated to involve more than 1,800 patients in several countries.
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Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering free speech and online censorship.
