‘Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s’

BOOK REVIEW

Take two at bedtime.

That’s what the label on the side of the bottle says, and that’s what you’ll do. You want to feel better soon— your health and well-being are important— so you’ll do as you’re told and follow all medical dosages. As in the new book, “Doctored” by Charles Piller, you’ll take your meds and cross your fingers.

For many months, 73-year-old Stephen Price had struggled.

It started with minor forgetfulness and by early 2021, Price had trouble remembering words and he could no longer run the business he owned. Knowing that his father wanted to “help” others, Price’s son, Matthew, a “Harvard trained epidemiologist and globalhealth specialist” had enrolled Price in a study using simufilam, a drug that had attracted considerable attention and garnered excitement.

If preliminary results were correct, simufilam could be the longsought- after cure for dementia, the Holy Grail of Alzheimer’s research. It wouldn’t be a cure, Matt knew. He wasn’t entirely comfortable with what he saw about the study or with Cassava Sciences, the drug’s maker, but it was a trial his father qualified for.

Designed to “slow, stop or reverse cognitive decline,” simufilam was created, says Piller, by a company that owned another drug that had been rejected by the FDA “over and over” and the company’s CEO “needed a new idea fast.” Two scientists on his team had one for him that, if it worked, would be a “breathtakingly lucrative” product for Cassava Science s...

In a laboratory in Vanderbilt University in Nashville, neuroscientist and cerebral amyloid angiopathy expert Matthew Schrag had been studying Alzheimer’s, hoping to help find a cure, when a request for petition for simufilam made him take pause. Reading them over, the studies seemed like a “sham” to him. He ultimately decided that “this … issue” needed to be reported to the National Institutes of Health.

If he was wrong about possiblyquestionable aspects of simufilam, it could destroy his career. If he was right, it would “derail ... the dominant view of how to cure one of the most terrifying diseases of our time.”

Reading somewhat like a medical thriller or an espionage novel, “Doctored” is packed with twists and turns, heroes and scandal. It’s also packed with a lot of facts and data that, to understand completely and comfortably, nearly requires a PhD.

If you have a working knowledge of Alzheimer’s, that may suffice.

Author Charles Piller is a scientific investigative journalist and he writes about how he learned of this story and why it became his “new obsession,” and that eagerness is contagious — even though you should know that this is a pretty heavy-duty book. Readers who are caretaking an elder or spouse may muddle through it and become baffled sometimes, but they’ll find enough information to make them really, really mad.

Cases of dementia, says Piller, will “more than double” in the next 25 years, and the cure is tantalizingly close. Or not. Either way, “Doctored” may help you understand why, but read carefully, or it might be hard to take.