Professor indicted over alleged scheme related to Alzheimer’s research

Hoau-Yan Wang, a 67-year-old tenured medical professor, was indicted this week for an alleged scheme involving fraudulent documents related to a potential treatment and test for Alzheimer’s disease.

As of 2020, nearly 6 million Americans were living with Alzheimer’s disease, per the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . It is the most common form of dementia in the U.S. There is currently no cure for the condition, but there are medications that help treat it.

According to court documents cited by the U.S. Department of Justice , Wang “allegedly engaged in a scheme to fabricate and falsify scientific data in grant applications made to the [U.S. National Institutes of Health] on behalf of himself,” and a biopharmaceutical company from May 2015 through last April.

Science reported that Wang, a Pennsylvania resident, was a professor at City University New York and a long-standing collaborator with Texas-based Cassava Sciences. It said that the professor had been under investigation by CUNY and federal authorities for more than two years for alleged fraud, including experiments “which underlie the controversial drug simufilam,” under development by Cassava.

“Wang, a long-standing Cassava collaborator and paid adviser to the firm, had also in 2022 received a damning lab inspection report from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration . The agency harshly criticized his analyses of samples of blood and cerebrospinal fluid for a clinical trial of Cassava’s drug, which some scientists say calls into question its claimed efficacy,” Science said.

The outlet also reported last year that a CUNY investigative committee found strong evidence of doctored images in Wang’s publications , including a 2012 paper in The Journal of Neuroscience “concluding that simufilam reduced toxic effects of beta amyloid, a protein whose abnormal build up in the brain is widely viewed as a cause of Alzheimer’s.”

A press release from the DOJ said Wang allegedly submitted fraudulent grant applications to the NIH and sought funding for scientific research related to Alzheimer’s disease. These efforts resulted in the award of approximately $16 million in grants from 2017 to 2021, including money that funded Wang’s laboratory work and salary.

“The indictment alleges that Wang’s work under these grants was related to the early developmental phases of the proposed drug and diagnostic test, typically referred to by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as Phase 1 and Phase 2,” said the DOJ. “Wang’s alleged scientific data falsification in the NIH grant applications related to how the proposed drug and diagnostic test were intended to work and the improvement of certain indicators associated with Alzheimer’s disease after treatment with the proposed drug.”

Wang was indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury in the District of Maryland. He was charged with one count of major fraud against the U.S., two counts of wire fraud, and one count of false statements. If he is convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison for the major fraud charge, 20 years in prison for each count of wire fraud, and five years in prison for the count of false statements.