With resignations of top leaders, Cassava Sciences exposes a dark, ugly corner of the Alzheimer’s disease world

Cassava Sciences is imploding — and as it crumbles, a dark, ugly corner of the Alzheimer’s disease world is being exposed and will hopefully get cleaned up.

Remi Barbier, Cassava’s longtime CEO, has resigned and is also leaving the board, the company announced Wednesday. Lindsay Burns, Cassava’s senior vice president of neuroscience, is gone, too. She is married to Barbier.

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Their abrupt departures come after the ​​Justice Department, on June 28, charged the company’s chief scientific collaborator and paid consultant, Hoau-Yan Wang, with multiple counts of fraud related to grants supporting Cassava’s experimental Alzheimer’s drug, called simufilam.

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