Charles Piller

Matthew Schrag's first exercise in validating scientific research was unofficial.

It came during his Ph.D.

training when he tried to reproduce the findings of a paper that had parallels to the rabbit paper that he had worked on as an undergrad with Othman Grebe.

He found that the work was not reproducible.

In 2021, this work took on a new scale.

Cassava Sciences had been known earlier as pain therapeutics.

They spent years trying to break into the opioid market, and then they switched their focus to Simufilam, an experimental drug for Alzheimer's.

The company's research collaborator was a medical school professor at City University of New York named Hao-Yen Wang.

His research had found that semufalum could reverse the misfolding of the protein filament A, which was hypothesized as a cause of Alzheimer's.

Consistent with the amyloid hypothesis, semufalum also promised to reduce inflammation by targeting the buildup of tau and beta amyloid in the brain.

Was the case about these scientist whistleblowers trying to prevent this drug from going forward because they thought it would be ineffective and was based on misrepresented data?

Was that the genesis of your involvement in this?

How did you then get on the list of people to be called by an attorney representing these whistleblower scientists?

OK, getting back to the Cassava Sciences case, the attorneys for the whistleblowers reached out and you said the images looked like they had been retouched.

Give me some detail there.

The images just didn't fit what a scientific expectation would be.

Did they look visually manipulated?

To a layperson, that sounds like a sort of Mickey Mouse misrepresentation.

And I don't mean to insult Mickey Mouse, but it seems kind of amateurish that to the naked eye, the images in a scientific paper could be seen to be manipulated.

Tell me about who you worked with and what that work was like to look at these data and what your conclusions were.