Recently, the medical community can be said to have exploded.
Because Science waved the anti-counterfeiting sledgehammer, a report with great importance was released not long ago. The hammer hits the target of two scholars who study Alzheimer's (which is commonly known as Alzheimer's , hereinafter referred to as AD) , named Sylvain Lesné and Karen Ashe, respectively.
investigation found that their paper published in Nature in 2006 was suspected of fraud.
Of course, if it is ordinary academic fraud, it will probably not be too much.
But this time it’s important, they are all big shots in the AD field.
Let’s put it this way, Nature once counted that among the nearly 60 million papers published around the world, only less than 15,000 were cited.
Although these papers are not all founded in the industry, they are mostly of the level of being intimidating.
The paper they were suspected of forgery has been cited more than 2,300 times because it is groundbreaking in the field of why AD occurs.
It is no exaggeration to say that this paper is the pioneering work in this field and is a classic among the classics.
Many media also say that if the paper is fake this time, it will be really hammered.
Our human research on AD may have been led to a deviation for 16 years.
has been a crooked from the foundation of theory, and pharmaceutical companies have to waste their investment and research of hundreds of billions of yuan.
So, negative reviews also smelled the smell and went to check some information.
But I found out that things. . . It's not as simple as imagined.
First of all, I will give you some knowledge about AD to facilitate and better eat melons.
In fact, people have discovered Alzheimer's disease, that is, Alzheimer's disease, for more than a hundred years.
But scientists have never understood why it gets sick.
Until the end of the last century, a theory called the "amyloid hypothesis" became popular.
is said to be a thing called A β oligo in brain tissue, and is the culprit for AD.
But it is still unclear which Aβ oligomer is taking the blame.
It was not until 2006 that the papers of our protagonists Sylvain Lesné and Karen Ashe appeared that the dilemma changed a little.
The paper said that they discovered a suspect named Aβ*56 in the Aβ oligomer family.
, and it also separated Aβ*56 through some experimental methods and injected into other small mice. . .
As a result, many of the little mice were confused and had a memory loss.
Good guy, aren’t these just stone hammers?
Because of this paper, it not only improves the reliability of the "amyloid hypothesis", but also specifically finds Aβ*56, one of the suspects in AD.
So they became famous in one article, won numerous awards, and became one of the founders of this field.
This academic fraud storm is related to Aβ*56.
Because a university professor felt that the newly developed AD medicine by the pharmaceutical factory Cassava recently seemed strange. . .
A wave of shorting also has the same views as the hero, investing in this university professor, hoping that he will continue to dig deeper. . .
finally traced the root of the source and discovered that the "Foundation Laying" article in 2006 and the images about Aβ*56 in their subsequent 9 papers may all be from PS. The conclusion of this pioneering work
may also be completely nonsense. . .
Anyway, as soon as this news came out, it was exploded, both inside and outside the circle.
Because of the entire market size of AD drugs, it has more than 600 billion US dollars. . .
And in the past 16 years, the "amyloid hypothesis" has become the mainstream research direction.
National Institutes of Health has invested in this direction this year.
, such as Johnson and Johnson , Merck , etc., have also been deeply involved in this "amyloid hypothesis" direction for a long time, spending billions of dollars.
Most of the media reports are like this:
"The ancestors of the theory have all faked it, and the direction has been wrong from the beginning... " "The biggest scandal in the academic circle!" " "The field of Alzheimer's disease has been subverted!" "The pharmaceutical giant is a tragic sucker and has been deceived for 16 years!"
Under the influence of these titles, for a time, the bad reviewer also felt that this was a shocking melon that subverted the AD field.
So much money, and the youth of researchers are in vain.
However, after checking more information by the bad reviewer, he found that the matter did not seem to be as serious as everyone else's rendering. . .
According to the investigation of the official account "Intellectuals", found that the papers that were actually suspected of fraud were only studied, Aβ*56, an Aβ oligomer.
Strictly speaking, if the last paper is really fake, it can only prove that Aβ*56's pot is doubtful.
does not prove that the entire "amyloid hypothesis" is wrong.
There is also, although the paper suspected of fraud has been cited more than two thousand times.
However, since the experiments in the paper are too difficult to reproduce, there are only about thirty or forty articles that really study Aβ*56.
The thunder sounds very loud, and seems to have affected countless things, but there are actually not many raindrops.
, and Aβ 40 and Aβ 42 are being studied in the circle now. Aβ*56 will burst, but it will not have much impact.
So the amyloid hypothesis will still be the mainstream theory in the field of AD research.
Of course, even if there is no suspected academic fraud incident this time.
actually has many doubts about the AD research field over the years.
Although there are many scientists who support the amyloid hypothesis, there has never been any truly useful medicine.
Whether it is Pfizer or Eli Lilly, these pharmaceutical giants with a market value of trillions, have all failed in large-scale clinical trials in this regard. . .
Take Aduhelm, a drug that was jointly compiled by Biogen and Eisai last year, as an example. It has caused great controversy in the United States.
is also developed based on the "amyloid hypothesis", but there are not many clinical experiments that can prove that it is really useful.
In this case, the US FDA (FDA) still issued a pass to this drug so that it can be launched quickly.
But the annual drug price of 50,000 to 60,000 US dollars, and not necessarily effective, it treats patients as guinea pigs. . .
was criticized and stopped the research in less than a year after it was listed, and even the CEO was tragically gone.
So in general, the "amyloid hypothesis" is really just a hypothesis.
just supports more scientists in this area and more related research.
Others such as tau protein hypothesis, neuroinflammatory hypothesis, etc. are also being continuously studied in depth.
However, so far, there is still no clearly proven pathogenic mechanism of Alzheimer's disease. . .
The last bad review I want to say is that the current situation of AD drug research and development is still the failure rate is as high as 99.6% (the failure rate of cancer drug research is only 81%) is considered to be the "crown jewel" in the drug research and development industry.
Although the impact of this fraud case may have been somewhat exaggerated by the media, it has also made it worse for the AD field, which has not much good news.
bad reviews also hope that one day, you can hear good news about AD research, rather than being suspected of fraudulent papers, like this time, will be out of the circle.
