Hoau-Yan Wang
Hoau-Yan Wang was a medical professor at the CUNY School of Medicine who retired in 2025. In 2024 he was charged by a federal grand jury in Maryland with defrauding the National Institutes of Health of about $16 million in research grants related to a drug called simufilam. The U.S. Department of Justice later dropped the charges with prejudice before the planned October 2025 trial, and in May CUNY said an internal review could not prove misconduct. Wang was born in Taiwan. He earned a bachelor’s degree from China Medical College and moved to the United States in the early 1980s for a master's at St. John’s University, followed by a PhD at the Medical College of Pennsylvania. He joined CUNY in the mid-2000s and studied how recreational drugs affect dopamine neurons. He began a long collaboration with Cassava Sciences (formerly Pain Therapeutics) while consulting on an addiction‑resistant painkiller that would act on the scaffolding protein filamin A, a project with Cassava researcher Lindsay Burns. When the drug failed as a painkiller, Cassava explored it for Alzheimer’s disease and named it simufilam in 2020. In August 2021 concerns about possible image manipulation in supporting studies led scientists and investors to urge halting the trials. The Office of Research Integrity notified CUNY, and in 2023 the university found that 14 of 31 allegations of misconduct were credible. The June 28, 2024 indictment charged fraud related to simufilam research, alleging data manipulation from 2015 to 2023. The October 2025 trial was canceled when the charges were dropped; Wang had retired from CUNY by that time.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 11:51 (CET).