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Picture Imperfect: Scores of papers by Eliezer Masliah, prominent neuroscientist and top NIH official, fall under suspicion
by Charles Piller

Science Translate This Article
26 September 2024

On 26 September 2024 Science reported: In 2016, when the U.S. Congress unleashed a flood of new funding for Alzheimer's disease research, the National Institute on Aging (NIA) tapped veteran brain researcher Eliezer Masliah as a key leader for the effort. He took the helm at the agency's Division of Neuroscience, whose budget -- $2.6 billion in the last fiscal year -- dwarfs the rest of NIA combined. Global Good News service views this news as the failure of modern science and health systems. Such 'flops' highlight the need for more intelligent, evolutionary, Natural Law based, life-supporting systems.

As a leading federal ambassador to the research community and a chief adviser to NIA Director Richard Hodes, Masliah would gain tremendous influence over the study and treatment of neurological conditions in the United States and beyond. ...

......But over the past 2 years questions have arisen about some of Masliah's research. A Science investigation has now found that scores of his lab studies at UCSD and NIA are riddled with apparently falsified Western blots -- images used to show the presence of proteins -- and micrographs of brain tissue. Numerous images seem to have been inappropriately reused within and across papers, sometimes published years apart in different journals, describing divergent experimental conditions. ...

...The dossier challenges far more studies than the two cited in NIH's statement, including many that underpin the development and testing of experimental drugs (see sidebar). Masliah's work, for example, helped win a nod from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical trials of an antibody called prasinezumab for Parkinson's. Made by Prothena -- a company backed by big money -- the drug is intended to attack alpha-synuclein, whose build up in the brain has been linked to the condition's debilitating physical and cognitive symptoms.

But in a trial of 316 Parkinson's patients, reported in 2022 in The New England Journal of Medicine, prasinezumab showed no benefit compared with a placebo. And volunteers given infusions of the antibody suffered from far more side effects such as nausea and headaches than those in a placebo group who received sham infusions. Prothena is now collaborating in another trial of the drug candidate involving 586 Parkinson's patients.

To read the entire article and see lists of Eliezer Masliah's research on Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, and images click here

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