Scientists Question Data Behind an Experimental Alzheimer’s Drug

Apr 19, 2022
Scientists Question Data Behind an Experimental Alzheimer’s Drug

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“There’s simply no risk, no rational means this might occur,” he mentioned.

Elisabeth Bik, a number one professional in picture manipulation, turned conscious of the corporate final summer season after quick sellers filed the F.D.A. petition. In a sequence of twitter posts, posts on her weblog and on the web site PubPeer, Dr. Bik has pointed to indicators that she mentioned present some outcomes had been copied and pasted from different experiments.

“These have been of extreme concern,” she mentioned in an interview. Primarily based on the sample of irregularities in pictures in a number of papers, she believes “it’s extremely doubtless that there was some manipulation happening.”

Charles Spruck, a most cancers researcher on the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in San Diego, who has greater than 25 years of expertise with the Western blot methodology, mentioned he believed the anomalies in these pictures might be the results of easy errors or vagaries of the method.

Irregularities or errors in a single or two pictures might be as a consequence of probability, however “while you see it repeatedly, it makes it unlikely that you could possibly do it unintentionally,” mentioned Dr. David Vaux, deputy director of scientific integrity and ethics on the Walter and Eliza Corridor Institute of Medical Analysis in Australia.

Mr. Barbier dismissed the criticisms, saying that the irregularities didn’t influence the corporate’s analysis findings. “These background pixels don’t have any influence on the info or its interpretation,” he mentioned, including “We stand by Professor Wang one hundred pc.”

Dr. Vaux and others bemoaned the restrictions of peer overview in figuring out errors or manipulation, and mentioned many scientific journals are reluctant to retract papers due to their concern of being sued, or harm to their very own reputations.

“It’s time for regulatory our bodies to step in, as evidently the peer overview course of has taken it so far as it could,” Dr. Hu mentioned. “If the tide has shifted such that the science appears to not be there, I simply don’t see how the scientific trials can proceed.”

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Supply- nytimes