The scientific literature on Alzheimer’s disease continues to be reviewed, and the quality of influential studies is called into question. In December 2023, due to“abnormalities” in certain figures and biostatistical errors, Nature so the study led by neurobiologist Marc Tessier-Lavigne was retracted.
It was published in 2009, when he was the president of the Californian company Genentech, and its main author presented as “milestone” in understanding neurodegenerative diseases.
In the meantime, the Canadian researcher assumed the position of president of the prestigious Stanford University (California).
He had to resign in the summer of 2023, after an internal investigation revealed that several falsified studies had been conducted in the laboratories he managed. His study room in Nature cited more than eight hundred times in scientific literature.
This highly respectable result, however, pales in comparison to the 2,343 citations from another study, published in 2006 in Nature, who reinforced the hypothesis of the role of β-amyloid-type protein accumulation in the etiology of Alzheimer’s disease.
The lead author, Karen Ashe (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis), just pointed out PubPeer – a site that allows you to question, including anonymously, the quality of scientific work – that it has decided to request its retraction.
She decided to do so two years after the magazine’s investigation Sciencecompetitor Nature, revealed several suspicious images. These manipulations were noticed by an American neurobiologist Matthew Schrag, and was confirmed by biologist Elisabeth Bik, a specialist in the detection of scientific fraud.
Matthew Schrag came across this information somewhat by accident, when he was commissioned by small investors in the pharmaceutical company Cassava Sciences who feared that Simufilam, its anti-Alzheimer’s drug, was developed on the basis of bogus studies.
In this mission, independent of his work at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Matthew Schrag compiled a file of thirty-four articles by researchers related to cassava cultivation. “serious concerns about scientific misconduct”.
The neurobiologist also noted a 2006 study led by Karen Ashe, the first of which was a Caen-trained French researcher, Sylvain Lesné, who joined her lab as a postdoctoral fellow. Matthew Schrag also detected problematic points in twenty scientific articles by the French.