Aussi at Harvard. Moir.

Moir’s experience is notable, however, because it shows that, even as one potential Alzheimer’s drug after another has failed for the last 15 years (the last such drug, Namenda, was approved in 2003), researchers with fresh approaches — and sound data to back them up — have struggled to get funded and to get studies published in top journals. Many scientists in the NIH “study sections” that evaluate grant applications, and those who vet submitted papers for journals, have so bought into the prevailing view of what causes Alzheimer’s that they resist alternative explanations, critics say.“They were the most prominent people in the field, and really good at selling their ideas,” said George Perry of the University of Texas at San Antonio and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. “Salesmanship carried the day.”Dating to the 1980s, the amyloid hypothesis holds that the disease is caused by sticky agglomerations, or plaques, of the peptide beta-amyloid, which destroy synapses and trigger the formation of neuron-killing “tau tangles.” Eliminating plaques was supposed to reverse the disease, or at least keep it from getting inexorably worse. It hasn’t. The reason, more and more scientists suspect, is that “a lot of the old paradigms, from the most cited papers in the field going back decades, are wrong,” said MGH’s Rudolph Tanzi, a leading expert on the genetics of Alzheimer’s.Even with the failure of amyloid orthodoxy to produce effective drugs, scientists who had other ideas saw their funding requests repeatedly denied and their papers frequently rejected. Moir is one of them.
https://www.statnews.com/2018/10/29/alzheimers-research-outsider-bucked-prevailing-theory/