Improving diagnostics for Alzheimer’s

Over the past 20 years, researchers have developed and helped commercialize blood tests for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Yet only half of patients with neurodegenerative diseases end up with an AD diagnosis. For the rest, no tests are available to determine which underlying disease is responsible for failing memory or other cognitive issues. Previous attempts to develop biomarkers for other types of dementia, such as frontotemperal dementia or Lewy body dementia, have been unsuccessful. This is likely because changes to the tissue in these diseases are more elusive in bodily fluids (cerebrospinal fluid, blood).

Taking up the search for new biomarkers, are two Swedish researchers, Kaj Blennow and Henrik Zetterberg , both from the University of Gothenburg. These researchers have hatched a 5-year plan to discover biomarkers for these alternative dementias. Using highly sensitive measuring methods in mass spectrometry, immunochemistry, and a large biobank that contains post-mortem brain samples from patients who had dementia, they investigate the activation of astrocytes and microglia—brain cells that have recently been found to play a more important role in dementia progression than previously thought. Previous research has given them good leads: several candidate biomarkers include alpha-synuclein for Lewy body dementia and Parkinson’s-like conditions.

During this webinar, the speakers will:

• Explain how blood-based biomarkers for neurodegenerative dementias are discovered
• Discuss the promises and pitfalls of using these biomarkers for diagnosis
• Recommend best practices for discovering biomarkers
• Answer questions during the live broadcast.

This webinar will last for approximately 60 minutes.

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