It appears that critical research that’s formed the basis for treatments of the disease was fabricated.
Alzheimer’s drug trials are notoriously ineffective. Now we may know at least part of the reason why.
A neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University has tipped off the scientific community that critical findings that have formed the foundation of Alzheimer’s research for nearly two decades may have been fabricated.
If this claim bears out, it will mean that for the last two decades, a huge proportion of potential Alzheimer’s drugs will have been developed under a false premise, and millions or even billions of dollars in funding — not to mention years of science and thinking — may have been sent after the wrong target.
The whistleblower, junior professor Matthew Schrag, MD, Ph.D., first raised his suspicions around a key 2006 study on Alzheimer’s in a letter to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). When that failed to prompt a swift response, he spread the word further, leading Science magazine to conduct its own six-month review of the images Dr. Schrag highlighted. The result seems to have confirmed Dr. Schrag’s fears.
The findings that caused Dr. Schrag concern were the keystone of a paper published in Nature magazine in 2006. That paper, “A specific amyloid-β protein assembly in the brain impairs memory,” apparently confirmed a hypothesis about the cause of the...
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