Finally, an article in the press that’s not a hit piece on Cassava

Cassava Biosciences has had the worst press imaginable with hit pieces in the Wall Street Journal, Science magazine, the New Yorker and the New York Times.  Finally Nature News has a balanced article showing how the shorts have been attacking the company and its drug — https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00050-z.

I’d written about this before and that post can be found after the ***

The Nature article discusses concerns by Elizabeth McNally editor of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, that journals are being manipulated by short sellers claiming that an article is fraudulent.

“Typically, when a whistle-blower contacts a journal about concerns over manipulated images or otherwise questionable data, the allegations are taken on good faith, McNally told Nature. The idea that whistle-blowers could be doing this for their own financial gain “was very eye-opening to me”, she says.”

One particular criticism of Cassava found in the Nature article is rather amusing. “Amid the allegations about Cassava’s data, researchers have expressed concern over how Simufilam works. Aside from the preliminary studies by Cassava and its collaborators, the strategy of stablilizing filamin-A to tackle Alzheimer’s hasn’t been on anyone’s radar, says George Perry, an Alzheimer’s researcher at the University of Texas at San Antonio. “The fact that it hasn’t been widely studied means that it hasn’t been confirmed.”

The fact that filamin-A hasn’t been on anyone’s radar is actually in its favor, since aBeta, the great white whale of Alzheimer’s research has been impaled with multiple expensive harpoons, with minimal benefit to patients.

The Nature article notes that some of the FDA petitioners wanted the Simulfilam studies stopped, something any drug company with a competing product for Alzheimer’s might wish, but should never ask for.

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The copy of this post was changed to respond to the valid criticisms of Dr. Elizabeth Bik.

 

Cassava shorts should be worried

Yesterday, 1 November ’22, a blockbuster  article was published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI) written by its editor Elizabeth McNally — https://www.jci.org/articles/view/166176.

It is just over a year ago since the first of the articles attacking Cassava Sciences appeared.  The first was in the New Yorker which profiled Jordan Thomas as the second coming of Christ for exposing supposed fraudulent data published by Cassava principals —

Radden Keefe P. The Bounty Hunter. The New Yorker. Updated January 17, 2022. Accessed October 11, 2022. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/24/jordan-thomas-army-of-whistle-blowers.

There were similar articles in Science — 2022;377(6604):358–363

and the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/18/health/alzheimers-cassava-simufilam.html.

They relied on the same assertions given to the FDA asking that the clinical trials be stopped because of ‘danger’ to the patients.

It’s worth reading McNally’s article completely.  It isn’t very long.

A few highlights (“the Journal” refers to the JCI)

“Throughout 2022, the Journal has been repeatedly contacted to comment on the 2012 JCI paper. Although we cannot be certain, there now appear to be new “short and distorters.” A recent round of emails was sent simultaneously to multiple journals and editors, identifying 25 articles with potential problems and providing recommendations on how the journals should respond. Importantly, these accusatory emails do not identify any financial conflicts of interest on the part of the whistleblowers. The emails insist that an investigation begin within 24 hours and request that the journals update them on investigative progress. As an editor, I am expressing concern because this represents a new means of manipulating the scientific publishing industry.”

So journal editors are like docs. They talk to each other to find out what’s really going on.  It is likely that McNally called up other journal editors to find out if her experience was common.

Here is why those sending the eMails should not sleep well of a night.

“Last, if the Journal uncovers allegations made for the purposes of stock manipulation, with evidence of misinformation, the JCI may elect to express its concern to the US Securities and Exchange Commission or the Department of Justice.”

It’s about time.

Whether the ‘whistle-blowers’ are guilty of anything will be determined by the suits (from investors losing money on Cassava, or perhaps Cassava itself) which are almost sure to follow.

As some of you know, I think Cassava’s data is even better than they realize. Be warned the following link is long, detailed and will require your concentration  — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2021/08/25/cassava-sciences-9-month-data-is-probably-better-than-they-realize/

Cassava Sciences — the clinical reality underneath the stock gyrations.

The stock of Cassava Sciences (symbol SAVA) has undergone some wild gyrations this year.  On 14 September it traded at 41.70, today just two weeks later it is trading in the upper 60s.

The important thing to keep in mind, is that 1 year out on treatment with SAVA’s drug Simufilam 50 patients with mild Alzheimer disease were (as a group) slightly improved.  This is absolutely unprecedented.  The best that previous therapy could accomplish was a slightly slower rate of decline — see arshttps://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/373/6555/624.full.pdf — for a recent review of other therapy attempts.  So Cassava’s results are unprecedented.   While Alzheimer (and other dementia) patients fluctuate from day to day (like the tides from minute to minute) at the end of a year they are all worse.

These results have not been attacked, unlike their data on the effect of Simufilam on biomarkers which has been criticized by a person of standing — Elizabeth Bik — https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2021/08/27/cassava-sciences-of-stocks-and-blots/#more-2692.

But that’s irrelevant and guilt by association at best.  As a clinical neurologist, no one was ever brought to see me because of their biomarkers.

They have released part of their 1 year results — https://www.cassavasciences.com/news-releases/news-release-details/cassava-sciences-announces-top-line-results-12-month-interim.  There is a lot more that I’d like to know, but a press release is not a detailed scientific paper.

What follows is a lot of commentary and speculation about the 1 year data which we haven’t seen yet.

The results concern the first 50 patients to complete one year on the drug.  The dropout rate is stated to be under 10%.  Presumably this includes death, in a cohort (presently at around 200) with a significant mortality.  It would be interesting to know how many patients on entry made it to one year.

As a clinical neurologist I was particularly impressed with part of their data at 9 months.  Here’s a link — keep it handy — https://www.cassavasciences.com/static-files/13794384-53b3-452c-ae6c-7a09828ad389.

They measured cognitive changes by something called ADAS-Cog — a full description can be found in the following post — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2021/08/25/cassava-sciences-9-month-data-is-probably-better-than-they-realize/

ADAS-Cog score counts errors, so a perfect score would be 0, and a terrible score would be 70.  The range of deficit on entry was 16 – 26 (but possibly on something else called the MMSE) — this is what the 1 year results used.  The 9 month results used ADAS-Cog.  Perhaps they are actually the same thing — I don’t know.

On the link — https://www.cassavasciences.com/static-files/13794384-53b3-452c-ae6c-7a09828ad389 — look at the diagram titled “Individual Patient Changes in ADAS-Cog (N = 50).

There were 5 patients out of 50 at 9 months with improvements of 11 – 14, which would mean that they were pretty close to normal if their entry score was 16 and 50% improved if their score was 26.  From here out I’m just calling them ‘the 5’.

The 9 month report doesn’t discuss this, and only a clinician would know, but this is the way neurologic patients respond to treatment.  Some do extremely well while others have no effect.  Why?  It’s probably because not really understanding causation, we classify patients clinically (it’s all docs have after all).

I ran a Muscular Dystrophy Clinic for 15 years back in the day.  The Muscular Dystrophy Association was founded by parents of weak kids.  They didn’t know that some weakness was due to the muscle itself (what we’re now calling muscular dystrophy), some was due to disease affected the nerves from the spinal cord to the muscle (what we call a neuropathy now) and others were due to disease of the cells in the spinal cord giving rise to the nerves to the muscle (motor neuron disease).  That all came later.

It is quite presumptuous to say that Alzheimer’s disease is just one thing.  Perhaps the 5 patients doing so very well had it from a different (as yet unknown) cause than the other 45.  Even so such a treatment would be worth having.

So here are a few questions for the folks at Cassava about their data

l. Some 16 different sites were involved in the open label study.  Were all of ‘the 5’  from the same site (doubtful — but if true, perhaps they tested ADAS-Cog differently, casting doubt on these results).

2. What were the ADAS-Cog scores initially on ‘the 5’.

3. What happened to ‘the 5’ in the past 3 months (did they maintain improvement, slide back, or improve further?)

4. We must have lots more people passing the 3, 6, 9 month markers.  Have their results paralleled that of the first 50 reaching the mileposts?   It would be very useful to know if there are now more than 5 with improvements over 10 in ADAS-Cog at 9 months.

The slightly slowing of improvement at 1 year relative to 9 months is typical of neurologic disease.  When L-DOPA was first available in the USA in 1970, some patients because so normal that you couldn’t tell they had Parkinson’s disease, and for a few years, neurologists (myself included) thought we were actually curing the disease.  Of course we weren’t and the underlying pathology of Parkinsonism (death of neurons using dopamine) continued unabated.  The L-DOPA just helped the surviving neurons function more efficiently.  Something similar may be going on with Simufilam and Alzheimer’s.

Now for some blue sky about Simufilam. Just as the gray hair on the head of an 80 year old looks the same under the microscope as one from a prematurely gray 30 year old, the brain changes of Alzheimer’s disease (the senile plaque)  are the same regardless of the age of onset.  Assuming that the senile plaque is in someway related to dementia (despite the lack of effect of therapies trying to remove it) and given that we all accumulate a few as we age, could Simufilam improve cognition in the elderly?   Would it then be intellectual viagra and the blockbuster drug of all blockbuster drugs.