Co-developer of Cassava ’s potential Alzheimer’s drug cited for ‘egregious misconduct’

Cassava Sciences, a biotech company whose work on the experimental Alzheimer’s drug simufilam has been heavily criticized and is the subject of ongoing federal probes, has suffered another blow. A much-anticipated investigation by the City University of New York has accused neuroscientist Hoau-Yan Wang, a CUNY faculty member and longtime Cassava collaborator, of scientific misconduct involving 20 research papers. Many provided key support for simufilam’s jump from the lab into ongoing clinical trials. The investigative committee found numerous signs that images were improperly manipulated, for example in a 2012 paper in The Journal of Neuroscience that suggested simufilam can blunt the pathological effects of beta amyloid, a protein widely thought to drive Alzheimer’s disease. It also concluded that Lindsay Burns, Cassava’s senior vice president for neuroscience and a co-author on several of the papers, bears primary or partial responsibility for some of the possible misconduct or scientific errors. The committee could not prove its suspicions, however, because Wang did not produce the original raw data. Instead, the panel says its finding of wrongdoing was based on “long-standing and egregious misconduct in data management and record keeping by Dr. Wang.” The 50-page report obtained by Science says the scientist failed to turn over to the panel “even a single datum or notebook in response to any allegati...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news