June 28 (UPI) — The Department of Justice said Friday that a Maryland grand jury indictment against Professor Hoau-Yan Wang alleges he defrauded the U.S. National Institutes of Health of approximately $16 million.
A Justice Department statement said Wang was a tenured professor at a public university and also served as a aid adviser and consultant for a publicly traded Texas biopharmaceutical company.
“From approximately May 2015 through approximately April 2023, Wang allegedly engaged in a scheme to fabricate and falsify scientific data in grant applications made to the NIH on behalf of himself and the biopharmaceutical company,” the DOJ said in a statement.
According to the DOJ fraudulent grant applications using the false data sought funding from the NIH.
The funding requests purported to be for “a potential treatment and diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s disease and resulted in the award of approximately $16 million in grants from approximately 2017 to 2021, part of which funded Wang’s laboratory work and salary. ”