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Two decades of Alzheimer's research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost millions of lives

Do note the controversy is specifically around the AB 56 oligomer specifically not the amyloid plaque idea as a whole. I've seen a lot of people conflate it. Don't have a horse in the race but want that to he clear.
 
Rule 2: Don’t Be Hateful
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My parental grandfather died of Alzheimers, my uncle, my fathers brother, was diagnosed a few months ago, ergo I may be pre disposed to Alzheimers as well.

If they did falsify the results and stunted the research for decades I hope they get dragged naked over fucking broken glass while still alive and no I am not fucking ITGing.

Motherfucking fuck sake.
 
It's… hard, not to go off on some kind of doubtfully legal crusade against this guy. If I saw him dying in the street, I don't know if I could make myself help him.

For the moment, I'm making do with pretending it probably didn't have that big an impact. And making sure not to learn enough that I could possibly track him down.
 
twsang said:
Do note the controversy is specifically around the AB 56 oligomer specifically not the amyloid plaque idea as a whole. I've seen a lot of people conflate it. Don't have a horse in the race but want that to he clear.
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Yeah, but it's not like the amyloid hypothesis in any form has produced anything but expensive and endless failure. No patience with amyloid targeting treatments, because they never worked, was easily a mainstream position in the med-chem trenches by 2016. The news has not gotten better, and the attitude towards the amyloid hypothesis as a whole has only gotten more bitter. It is not difficult to find people who will denounce it as a total experimental failure. We can clear amyloid, prevent it from forming. It doesn't stop or even slow the disease. We've proved that across a dozen each of antibodies and small molecules.
 
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Of course, these sorts of things are also encouraged by the fact that there's profits in it. An Egyptian friend of mine told me about a scandal involving a researcher bribed roughly $5000 USD to try to skip a few of the research steps for Tier 3 of this vaccine, because the company stood to make tens of millions of dollars if they could be the first to release this vaccine.

Which is absolute peanuts for the company, but enough to tempt someone to crime. The man who did this fradulent research probably got a fraction of a fraction of the profits that companies did by making cures that their own studies showed didn't work. Hell, as the article points out I believe, there's even a new drug that's about to increase everyone's healthcare costs by existing despite it not actually working.

I'm furious at him, but there are also companies that by this point had to know it wasn't really working and still tucked away a very tidy profit running down an increasingly obvious blind alley.

...there are a lot of people to be pissed at.
 
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Reading this article is a fucking trip after I just finished watching my Alzhimer's lectures for uni.

EDIT: Finished reading the two articles and holy shit, how the fuck did this stay under the radar for nearly a decade and a half? My mind is boggled at the number of wasted phase 3 trials that were based on a case of data manipulation. If this article was false, it would render a good chunk of most disease-course drug research on Alzhimer's bogus.
 
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Not just co-authors. It has claims ranging from this:
Jucker said:
I do not think the field would have developed any differently without the Lesne work.
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to this:
Haass said:
Regarding Aβ56*, we were skeptical about the data from the beginning, and our lab never started a project on it.
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to this:
Brody said:
In my own group, we tried replicating the Aβ *56 western blots for about a year, without success.
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to this:
Willbold said:
I don't know of any lab that has found evidence for this specific Aβ*56 species since 2007.
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I'd stuff this case into the "public and independent replication attempts are important" file. The fact that a bunch of labs were discounting the result, and the lack of successful replication despite the paper's prominence, should have raised some flags a long time ago.
 
I'd probably be angrier at this travesty of both science and human decency if I were actually surprised that someone would do this.
 
Laeril said:
I'd probably be angrier at this travesty of both science and human decency if I were actually surprised that someone would do this.
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It's an endemic issue in scientific publications, unfortunately -
"It's a terrible problem that we can't rely on some aspects of the scientific literature," says Ferric Fang, a microbiologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, who worked on a study with Bik in which she analysed more than 20,000 biomedical papers, finding problematic duplications in roughly 4% of them
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The Laurent said:
The man who did this fradulent research probably got a fraction of a fraction of the profits that companies did by making cures that their own studies showed didn't work.
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This is simply untrue. Aside from the one, probably a big mistake approval you mention, nobody made profit off these cures that don't work, because the FDA requires you to (normally) show efficacy in addition to safety. And every Alzheimer's drug has failed efficacy. None but the one have gone to market, and it is thus impossible for them to make profits. Alzheimer's is a land of broken dreams and horrible losses inside the pharmaceutical industry too. It's likely the person who did the fradulent research has made far more money off it than anyone in pharma, the one approval aside.

It's not even clear that the one which did get approved is actually making money, because, well, efficacy outcomes can be read by insurance companies too, who pay for most drugs.
 
Graviator said:
I'd stuff this case into the "public and independent replication attempts are important" file. The fact that a bunch of labs were discounting the result, and the lack of successful replication despite the paper's prominence, should have raised some flags a long time ago.
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Really it should have been caught by peer review even before anyone tries to replicate it.

I guess the bigger question is how to promote a culture of integrity in academia in the face of incentives to publish shoddy or outright deceptive results. Maybe there will always be bad actors, but it will be worse in an over-competitive (or otherwise dysfunctional) environment where it's easier to rationalise cheating to one's self.
 
Night said:
This is simply untrue. Aside from the one, probably a big mistake approval you mention, nobody made profit off these cures that don't work, because the FDA requires you to (normally) show efficacy in addition to safety. And every Alzheimer's drug has failed efficacy. None but the one have gone to market, and it is thus impossible for them to make profits. Alzheimer's is a land of broken dreams and horrible losses inside the pharmaceutical industry too. It's likely the person who did the fradulent research has made far more money off it than anyone in pharma, the one approval aside.

It's not even clear that the one which did get approved is actually making money, because, well, efficacy outcomes can be read by insurance companies too, who pay for most drugs.
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That kind of depends on how much government funding the pharma company is getting for those failed trials. Also if the higher ups got to sell their stock at a nice mark up before the trails turned out to fail. Always important to remember that the people in charge of a company can make money even while losing money for the company as long as they are vaguely competent in having plausible deniability.
 
Tasrill said:
That kind of depends on how much government funding the pharma company is getting for those failed trials. Also if the higher ups got to sell their stock at a nice mark up before the trails turned out to fail. Always important to remember that the people in charge of a company can make money even while losing money for the company as long as they are vaguely competent in having plausible deniability.
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None, because the government is not pouring in the hundreds of millions it would take. Government science grants in pharma come earlier and are much smaller, in the hundreds of thousands at most. And, frankly, the other incentive has largely evaporated because people expect the trials to fail. Stock tanks as endpoints approach. There's no buildup in anticipation of a success for this field and hasn't been for almost a decade. Eli Lilly took that kind of enthusiasm out back and shot it with their repeated trials of their antibodies.
 
Silent Optics said:
Really it should have been caught by peer review even before anyone tries to replicate it.
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Peer review is overrated as a way to catch outright fraud; independent replication ought to be what counts. A fraudster can fool his peers, particularly if he's familiar with the common processes by which his peers detect fraud. But he can't fool reality and probably can't fool a complete stranger's lab equipment either.

I don't put a lot of blame on the original paper's peer reviewers for missing the image manipulation. But it should have been double-checked with a microscope after Brody's group wasted a year trying to detect a nonexistent substance.
 
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Rule 2: Don’t Be Hateful - Even though your personal grief is considerable, please do not construct revenge fantasies.
I hope Lesné is punished or killed, I hope a big deal is made about this MONSTER, I hope no one who had a hand in this gets off Scott free,... My grandmother withered away from this disease and now evidence came out that our "research" amounted to lining pockets!!! I honestly want pain to be put upon on these people I want them to rot literally in the brain IDC if this is beneath me to be so angered cuz this hits personally. THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR WHAT THEY DID THEY ONLY DID IT BECAUSE THEY ARE GREEDY. I need to lie down
 
Bodies are weird things, and brains doubly so. I think this may lead to the reclassification of amloid plaques as a symptom of Alzheimer's, not the cause.

This is a problem with humans as a whole though. It's very easy to get into the mindset of, "X can't fail; it can only be failed," as we saw here. Sucks that we wasted so much time and effort on it, and I wish they had realized that it was inaccurate data prior, but alas.

We'll figure out Alzheimer's, sadly that day is further away because of this.
 
Night said:
This is simply untrue. Aside from the one, probably a big mistake approval you mention, nobody made profit off these cures that don't work, because the FDA requires you to (normally) show efficacy in addition to safety. And every Alzheimer's drug has failed efficacy. None but the one have gone to market, and it is thus impossible for them to make profits. Alzheimer's is a land of broken dreams and horrible losses inside the pharmaceutical industry too. It's likely the person who did the fradulent research has made far more money off it than anyone in pharma, the one approval aside.

It's not even clear that the one which did get approved is actually making money, because, well, efficacy outcomes can be read by insurance companies too, who pay for most drugs.
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Medicare refused to cover Aduhelm except in clinical trials, which was the end of that. Biogen has more or less given up on it.

 
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