0:00 The stars are aligning
3:20 Consensus that amyloid precedes TAU
7:50 Therapeutics: the earlier, the better
12:10 New blood texts transforming diagnostics for phosphorylated TAU
17:00 Biomarker research today
22:20 New proteomics tools enabling better stratification
36:55 Calling on the EMA to approve new therapies
Alzheimer’s disease is now one of the hottest areas of research despite little progress in the decades up to about five years ago. The disease was proving especially difficult to diagnose early and to treat.
Today, researchers are largely on board with the amyloid cascade hypothesis. Several FDA-approved drugs treat the disease, with another just added last week. New biomarkers for Alzheimer’s enabled by a new generation of proteomics tools promise to change care by giving patients the chance to be treated early before “the neural networks are too damaged.”
Henrik Zetterberg joins us to look inside at the exciting developments in Alzheimer’s. Zetterberg is a professor at the University of Gothenburg and one of the world’s leading experts in the field. He has been using innovative technologies, including Alamar’s NULISA technology, to help detect key and difficult-to-find protein biomarkers of neurodegeneration in blood.
“In the US, there are studies ongoing with people who do not have symptoms but are biomarker positive for Alzheimer’s pathology,” he says in the interview. “These studies are going to be so exciting because they answer the question, ‘If you remove amyloid before you have clinically significant neural network breakdown, will that stop the disease or slow it down?’”
After summarizing the field, Zetterberg ends with an appeal to the European Medical Agency to approve these new drugs. They’re working.
Henrik Zetterberg on the Current Excitement Around Alzheimer’s Research