Facing charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission for misleading claims related to a controversial Alzheimer’s drug candidate, Cassava Sciences and two of the company’s former executives have agreed to pay fines, the company announced Thursday.
The news comes on the same day that the SEC filed charges against Cassava, former CEO Remi Barbier, and former senior vice president of neuroscience Lindsay Burns. In a lawsuit filed with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, the agency accused Cassava of making several misleading claims in September 2020 related to a mid-stage trial of its Alzheimer’s drug, simufilam. The SEC’s charges included allegations that the company and its former execs failed to disclose that trial samples were analyzed by a Cassava collaborator, Hoau-Yan Wang, who had a financial stake in the drug’s success, and that a company audit later found Wang’s lab was “unacceptable and temporarily not qualified” to help with the analysis of future studies.
The agency also alleged that Cassava and Burns didn’t fully disclose that Burns hand-picked data that made simufilam seem more effective in improving memory and cognition than the findings of the full data set, or that Burns selected certain outcome measurements only after she knew which patients had been given drug or placebo.
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