Undisclosed conflicts, lightning-fast peer review: One Alzheimer’s journal’s role in a failed drug

Retraction Watch readers are likely familiar with the work of Charles Piller, an award-winning investigative reporter who has been covering problematic research in neuroscience and other fields for Science. We’re pleased to offer an excerpt of his new book, Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s, which publishes today.


The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease (JPAD) seems authoritative and looks prestigious. Its sponsors are Springer, a division of Springer Nature, one of the largest scientific publishers, and the annual Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease Congress—a major, global scientific meeting. Many doctors rely on JPAD when deciding whether to prescribe amyloid-reducing drugs such as Leqembi, or others to fight agitation or anxiety that can accompany Alzheimer’s dementia.

Matthew Schrag first raised an eyebrow about the journal in August 2021 while examining possible misconduct in studies behind Cassava Sciences’ simufilam for the citizen petition to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The prior year, JPAD had published a paper by Cassava’s Lindsay Burns and Hoau-Yan Wang that suggested strong potential for the drug. It said simufilam lowered key biomarkers associated with Alzheimer’s—particularly tau proteins—in the spinal fluid of patients who were volunteers for the company’s clinical trial. That paper helped boost confidence in Cassava and simufilam.

Schrag thought an image central to its experimental findings looked strange. A single band of a western blot depicting the presence of tau seemed to have been copied and pasted into the larger image. He emailed his doubts to JPAD editors in September 2021. Bruno Vellas, a French neuroscientist and then coeditor-in-chief, handled the query. He seemed a curious respondent, because Vellas and Wang coauthored a similar 2017 article in another journal. It too showed biomarker benefits from simu- filam. Schrag thought that it too showed strong signs of image doctoring; that paper would be retracted in 2022.

Soon after, Schrag asked ethics administrators at Springer to examine the matter, and coeditor-in-chief Paul Aisen of the University of Southern California took over the complaint. Vellas also stepped down as coeditor-in-chief. Independently, I confirmed Schrag’s findings with image-integrity specialists and Alzheimer’s researchers who were not affiliated with JPAD. Yet eleven months after Schrag raised his concern, Cassava issued a press release saying JPAD had exonerated the paper. Aisen later told Schrag that they had run the images by experts familiar with western blots, rather than a forensic-image analyst. The article helped smooth simufilam’s glide path to late-stage human trials.

Schrag noticed University of Nevada neuroscientist Jeffrey Cummings among its editorial board members. Cummings, an authority on Alzheimer’s trials and amyloid hypothesis advocate, had with Harvard’s Dennis Selkoe sharply criticized my 2022 “Blots on a Field?” article in Science about the influential study by Sylvain Lesné and Karen Ashe. The same story described concerns about Cassava’s work. As of April 2024, Cummings was a long-standing paid member of Cassava Sciences’ advisory board.

According to federal records, Cummings augments his income—by nearly $1 million in personal fees and travel in the last few years alone—consulting for a laundry list of big and small Alzheimer’s companies, including Cassava, Biogen, Eisai, Alzheon, and Acadia.

Other top JPAD editors show similar issues. Vellas has received consulting fees from Eisai and others. Aisen has been paid more than $100,000 since 2016 by makers of anti-amyloid drugs. As head of a clinical research center, he has pulled in tens of millions of corporate dollars to test such drugs. Another editor, Brown University’s Stephen Salloway, took $170,000 in fees and $25 million in research support. Others on the journal’s editorial board show similar figures. Current and former Biogen and Eisai employees have actually served on that board.

Anti-amyloid drugs from those companies and others often have received favorable coverage in JPAD in papers written by Cummings, Aisen, Vellas, and Salloway. Their articles supported the companies’ arguments that their drugs enjoyed a sound scientific foundation at critical junctures in the development and regulatory process.

Biogen and Eisai’s drug Aduhelm became a fiasco that never achieved full federal approval. Yet JPAD’s “‘expert panel’ produced ‘appropriate use recommendations’ for aducanumab [Aduhelm] before the clinical trials of [Aduhelm] had even been published,” Schrag noted in his analysis. “Five of the six members of this panel were paid by Biogen and/or Eisai,” the drug’s makers. They included Salloway and Cummings. “This was not disclosed in the abstract or main text, but only in fine print at the end of the article,” Schrag added.

Like any normal journal, JPAD relies on peer review to ensure accuracy and scientific relevance. Unpaid, ostensibly unbiased and skeptical experts critique each submission. Peer reviewers nearly always request clarifications or changes to sharpen and improve a manuscript. Such reviews and corrections, required for acceptance of a paper, typically take weeks and can last several months. The delays understandably frustrate authors, but high-quality reviews of complex science take time. The Nature journals—among the world’s most respected—average 213 days from submission to acceptance. The Science journals move at a comparable pace, 202 days. JPAD’s “peer reviewed” guidelines for Aduhelm took eight days, including a US holiday.

Schrag wondered how fast JPAD generally completed peer reviews, examining the dates manuscripts were submitted and approved. Some cases involving Cummings and his affiliated companies proceeded at an improbable clip. The Cassava biomarker study took seven days. A favorable 2016 study of the anti-amyloid drug tramiprosate, coauthored by Vellas, Cummings, and Serge Gauthier, another coeditor-in-chief, took just six. The drug’s maker, Alzheon, paid all three of those scientists for consulting at the time, and they served on its advisory board.

“This casts a shadow on the whole publishing and peer review process,” said Donna Wilcock, the Indiana University neuroscientist and chief editor of Alzheimer’s & Dementia, who examined a dossier Schrag prepared about JPAD. “Anytime you get a paper that is accepted within a week of being received, I guarantee it’s not been peer reviewed.” Wilcock worries about the JPAD guidelines for prescribing anti-amyloid antibodies, she said. “That’s what all of us are using to guide our clinical programs. If they are not undergoing peer review, as advertised, then you’ve got to question the robustness of those papers.”

Cummings also has described his own credentials in an unorthodox way. The physician prominently notes a ScD degree in his biographical materials—reinforcing his credibility as a researcher. He fails to mention that his undergraduate alma mater, the University of Wyoming Laramie, bestowed the ScD in 2011 as an honorary degree. He replied to my query about this via JPAD editor Jacques Touchon, who noted that the university found Cummings’s voluminous writings “worthy of an advanced degree.” According to the university registrar, “An honorary degree was given to [Cummings] in 2011 based off his contributions to his profession. Honorary degrees are not noted on official transcripts.”

A 2018 JPAD article suggested that pimavanserin, a drug to treat psychosis among Alzheimer’s patients, was effective. The manuscript cleared peer review the same day JPAD editors received it. Public disclosures show that afterward, Cummings—the first listed author—received about $65,000 in various fees from its developer, Acadia Pharmaceuticals. The journal accepted a second paper extolling the benefits of the drug for patients with “pronounced psychotic symptoms” on the day received.

According to Schrag’s analysis, JPAD published 129 research articles, including expert statements and drug-use guidelines, between 2019 and 2021. When one of the journal’s editors-in-chief—including Vellas, Aisen, and Gauthier—coauthored a paper, submission to acceptance averaged about twenty-three days, compared to a still-brisk fifty-two days for other papers.

“It raises questions about whether this journal is a fair and legitimate venue for the dissemination of scientific results, or . . . a personal platform for selected editors and their allies,” Schrag noted in his analysis.

I forwarded Schrag’s concerns and my own questions to all of the concerned editors. They sent a joint reply that they review quality and police conflicts of interest rigorously. Pharma company leaders, they said, “are among the most knowledgeable experts in the field and contribute important perspectives,” and that editors from Biogen and Eisai do not “review clinical trial results due to potential conflict of interest.” JPAD relies on declarations by authors to avoid such conflicts, the editors said, noting that “statistically, we have good reason to believe that we are in the right.”

Vellas denied receiving personal compensation from Alzheon, although he disclosed receiving “fees and/or stock options” from the company in the pages of JPAD itself within a favorable article, in 2017, about that company’s drug tramiprosate. In November 2023, Vellas said he had asked his assistant to put in corrections to his own journal, and to others in which he said he had accidentally disclosed payments from Biogen that were not received. Seven months later, no corrections had been posted.

Regarding the ultrafast peer review process for themselves, they noted, “because the editors-in-chief and board members lead some of the most important clinical and research centers in the field, it is unsurprising that some papers from their teams are of high value and readily judged to be publishable [and] accepted quickly due to their quality, originality, or importance.” They added: “We do not give priority to anyone.”

Jason Karlawish, an eminent ethicist and Alzheimer’s expert at the University of Pennsylvania, and JPAD’s ethics editor from its inception through 2020, declined to comment about any of these matters. “My experiences were precisely none,” he said about his work at the journal. “It was one of those roles that never moved on from a title.”

Copyright © 2025 by Charles Piller. From the forthcoming book DOCTORED by Charles Piller to be published by One Signal Publishers, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.


Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].


Processing…
Success! You're on the list.

3 thoughts on “Undisclosed conflicts, lightning-fast peer review: One Alzheimer’s journal’s role in a failed drug”

  1. As well as The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease
    https://link.springer.com/journal/42414
    there is also The Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease
    https://www.j-alz.com/
    A couple of examples at Pubpeer from the latter journal:-
    https://pubpeer.com/publications/97D2621977E9F60B473947F27F00C9
    https://pubpeer.com/publications/15D6B78443DC4CB3D19F46BD9D089F
    Shared author, Frédéric Checler, was awarded the 2014 Claude Pompidou prize for his work on Alzheimer’s disease
    https://www.vaincrealzheimer.org/2014/10/03/le-docteur-frederic-checler-membre-du-conseil-dadministration-de-lecma-remporte-le-prix-claude-pompidou/
    and has over 50 papers commented on at Pubpeer:
    https://pubpeer.com/search?q=checler

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.