Internal Review Found 'Falsified Data' in Stanford President's Alzheimer's Research, Colleagues Allege

Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne was formerly executive vice president for research and chief scientific officer at biotech giant Genentech, according to his page on Wikipedia. 'In 2022, Stanford University opened an investigation into allegations of Tessier-Lavigne's involvement in fabricating results in articles published between 2001 and 2008.'

But Friday Stanford's student newspaper published even more allegations:
In 2009, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, then a top executive at the biotechnology company Genentech, was the primary author of a scientific paper published in the prestigious journal Nature that claimed to have found the potential cause for brain degeneration in Alzheimer's patients. 'Because of this research,' read Genentech's annual letter to shareholders, 'we are working to develop both antibodies and small molecules that may attack Alzheimer's from a novel entry point and help the millions of people who currently suffer from this devastating disease.'

But after several unsuccessful attempts to reproduce the research, the paper became the subject of an internal review by Genentech's Research Review Committee (RRC), according to four high-level Genentech employees at the time... The scientists, one of whom was an executive who sat on the review committee and all of whom were informed of the review's findings at the time due to their stature at the company, said that the inquiry discovered falsification of data in the research, and that Tessier-Lavigne kept the finding from becoming public.

Tessier-Lavigne denies both allegations. Genentech said in a statement that 'as part of our diligence related to these allegations, we reviewed the records from that November 2011 RRC meeting and saw no allegations of fraud or wrongdoing.' The company acknowledged that 'given that these events happened many years ago... our current records may not be complete.'

After the review, which began in 2011, Genentech canceled research based on the paper's findings. Till Maurer, a senior scientist at the company from 2009-2018 who said he was assigned to develop drugs based on the 2009 paper, told The Daily that his superior informed him that, in Maurer's words, 'the project is being canceled and it's because they found falsified data....'

According to the executive who was part of the committee that reviewed the paper, the inquiry was thorough and left little room for doubt. Laboratory technicians and assistants were interviewed while scientists independent of the lab attempted to verify the findings of the study. 'None of [the research review committee members] believed that these data were true by the time people had attempted to reproduce it,' the executive said. He said that the understanding of the research committee was that the paper's supposed finding of N-APP's role in Alzheimer's had been 'faked,' and used 'made up' figures as evidence.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.