Podcast – ADPD 2023 Conference Highlights. Part One

Voice Over:

… brought to you by Dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK, Alzheimer’s Society, Race Against Dementia, and the Alzheimer’s Association, bringing you research, news, career tips, and support.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Hello, and thank you for tuning in into the Dementia Research Podcast. I’m Dr. Nikoleta Daskoulidou, and I’m a post-doctoral researcher at the UK Dementia Research Institute in Cardiff. It’s my pleasure to be hosting this special episode recorded on location at the AD/PD Conference in Gothenburg. Sweden’s second city, Gothenberg was founded in 1621 and is the birthplace of Volvo.

This is the first show in a two-part special bringing you all the news and highlights from this massive international conference. Today, we are going to reflect on the scientific program and the talks that have taken place over the first three days of the event. Joining me to share the highlights are Dr. Susan Mitchell, Dr. David Koss, and Elizabeth English.

Hello, everyone.

Dr David Koss:

Hi.

Dr Susan Mitchell:

Hi.

Elizabeth English:

Hi Nikoleta.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Thank you all for joining me. I think we can start by going around the table and doing some proper introductions. You can tell us a little about yourself and your work. Would you like to start, Susan?

Dr Susan Mitchell:

Yeah. Hi, I’m Susan Mitchell. I work at Alzheimer’s Research UK, one of the UK’s leading dementia research charities. I’m actually in the Policy and Public Affairs team. I’m head of policy, so I’m really interested in understanding what’s happening with science, and then how actually you can start to implement that with an eye on things like new treatments with [inaudible 00:01:50] on the horizon and other treatments. We’re really interested to know what that means, how you’re going to convince policy makers to perhaps implement that and what that means more broadly. So, I’m taking quite a top-level approach, but it’s really interesting to see the most innovative science happening.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

That’s amazing. Thank you. And let’s continue with David.

Dr David Koss:

Hi, I’m David Koss. I’m a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Newcastle. I effectively work on a variety of different neurodegenerative diseases, and that includes Alzheimer’s disease but also dementia with Lewy bodies. Whilst the majority of my work looks at postmortem human tissue from the Newcastle Brain Tissue Resource, we also look at a variety of different models. I’m particularly interested in cell stress responses that occur as part of the neurodegenerative pathway. And really at the moment, I’m very excited about DNA damage, and I think that really holds a potentially therapeutically exploitable pathway that we can look into for a variety of neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Thank you. Interesting. And Lizzie?

Elizabeth English:

Hi, everyone. I’m Lizzie English. I’m a second year PhD student at the University of Cambridge, based in the UK DRI there, but also in the chemistry department. My work looks at protein aggregates also in post-mortem brain tissue, actually. I’m looking at how those proteins change in their size, shape, and number across Alzheimer’s disease specifically.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Amazing. Thank you. And for those who don’t know me, my research interests include the role of innate immunity and neuro-inflammation in Alzheimer’s disease. So, I’m fascinated by the complement system and its critical role in AD pathogenesis, and that makes it a potential therapeutic target. My focus is on complement receptor 1, CR-1, which is a big [inaudible 00:03:44] for late onset Alzheimer’s disease. And so, my goal is to provide knowledge about how CR-1 confers risk to AD. I use stem cell models and also human brain tissue controlling AD samples.

So, thanks, everyone. Before we get into your highlights, I should ask if any of you are presenting this week?

Dr David Koss:

Yeah, I have a poster on DNA damage intervention with Lewy bodies. The poster number now I believe is 726. And through that, I will show you how [inaudible 00:04:25] is present in the nucleus of human brain cells, but also how that affects double strand DNA breaks. And then I’ll talk to you through some proteomics analysis we’ve got as well. So please come by.

Elizabeth English:

Awesome.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Yeah. We hope we find you there.

Elizabeth English:

I’ve got a poster as well. Confusing with the abstract numbers. It’s abstract number 11, but I’m a poster seven at least they’re close together, so-

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Okay.

Elizabeth English:

… you should find me.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Yes.

Elizabeth English:

And my poster is on my postmortem studies in Alzheimer’s disease, how Phosphorylated Tau increases across the disease stages in certain brain regions, but not all of them. And how the size and shape of those aggregates’ changes across the disease. You’ll have to come to my poster to see more.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Will do for sure. Thank you. It’s fantastic. And I also have a poster. It’s number 107. I double checked it. And this is on my recently published work establishing that common receptor one is expressing the brain and [inaudible 00:05:29] cells because there was [inaudible 00:05:31] overseeing the field over this. And also, I presented the process with some new cool functional data showing the impact of the CR1ID risk variant in IPS micro [inaudible 00:05:44] doses. I used [inaudible 00:05:47] from controlling the tissue.

Dr David Koss:

Cool.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

So, let’s get to the highlights now. David, would you like to go first?

Dr David Koss:

Sure. I’m going to start with unsurprisingly something to do with DNA damage. This was a really good talk yesterday from Dr. Montalbano from the University of Texas. And whilst I’ve been focused on dementia with Lewy bodies, what I thought was really nice about this talk is it looked at DNA damage or changes in the nucleus across a variety of different neurodegenerative diseases. So, there was Alzheimer’s disease, but there was also dementia with Lewy bodies as well as PSP. And what they really started to do was to just look in postmortem human tissue and investigate morphological changes in the nucleus. And actually, something just as very simple and straightforward as measuring the size of the nucleus, they were able to demonstrate that there were changes going on that were associated with pathology. And in actual fact, it was cell type specific, and it was disease specific.

So, what they found was that in Alzheimer’s disease you have an increased size of the nucleus suggesting that you have a kind of opening up of the chromatin, which may be an indication of DNA damage. And that was present in both neurons and astrocytes. But then actually in dementia with Lewy bodies, it seemed that there was a shrinkage of the nucleus. And so, suggesting that the chromatin is actually condensed, you might have reduced transcription that’s going on with that. And that was actually present not only in the neurons, the astrocytes, but also the microglia. So, it seems like there’s a variety of different cellular responses that are going on in these neurodegenerative conditions. What I thought was very nice was that the focus was really mostly on tau. And again, tau is one of these proteins that’s beginning to be understood to also have a role within the nucleus. So, they were able to show by using [inaudible 00:07:53] that if they applied this onto, I think it was primary neurons that very quickly induced a cytoplasmic type of pathology but also nuclear type pathology. And again, they were able to kind of recapitulate these changes in neuronal nuclei size as well.

And I think that it’s a very, very interesting study, particularly as it highlights that there’s this commonality of DNA damage across the spectrum, but also that it’s an early occurring phenomenon. We see ourselves in various models as well. So, it’s not just the result or the end stage of a long period of very toxic environment, but it’s something that’s triggered upon the arrival of these toxic species. And of course, it’s very exciting because DNA damage is something that the cancer fields have been studying for a long time and there are many drugs that could actually be repurposed or at least investigated for use across the spectrum. So, it was a really excellent talk actually. I really enjoyed it.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Amazing. Are you planning to use any of the techniques that you mentioned?

Dr David Koss:

Yeah, well yeah, so myself and the speaker actually had quite an extensive conversation in the morning about various different approaches, actually. One thing that we’ve kind of focused on is actually subcellular fractionation. So, taking human postmortem tissue and separating out the nuclei so we can then do downstream proteomics. And for his purposes, he was saying that that’d be something he’d be interested in pursuing. And certainly, for us, I think actually we already have measurements of the nuclei because we’re looking at this in an immunohistochemistry and we are already investigating levels of markers of DNA breaks. And so, we already have these areas, but we haven’t actually just looked to see the size difference. So, it’s just something we can quite quickly go back and look, and it’d be something I’d be interested to kind of follow up on.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Amazing. Thank you for sharing that. Very interesting. Susan, would you like to share a highlight of yours?

Dr Susan Mitchell:

Yeah, I really enjoyed one of the opening talks by Kai [inaudible 00:10:18] who did a real summary of where we are with blood-based biomarkers. I think that’s a feature of the conference. It’s quite a lot of excitement about progressive biomarkers and how they can be used. And from my perspective, I’m trying to think about what that means for the clinical pathway for the impact for patients. And we know that blood is really interesting in terms of how it might help us enable treatments to get to patients. The current diagnostic biomarkers around using CSF or PET are brilliant in terms of their use in the research setting but are really problematic to put in a clinical setting because they’re just not scalable, they’re quite invasive, they’re really expensive. So, blood’s really intriguing, but it’s how you get it closer to the patient. And I think he did a really nice summary of across the spectrum, much of it well established.

But the bit that I was really intrigued by was obviously appreciating that a single blood test, how are you going to use it and what does it mean? And I think he quite nicely recognized that you can really think about a blood test really identifying people at really quite high risk of high amyloid status already low, that those are quite clear. But it was the people in the middle that were a bit more problematic and really identifying that perhaps that’s a group where you’d then use a further diagnostic test. And I thought that was quite a nice model that you could take forward. So, for me that was a nice highlight.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

I totally agree with you. I [inaudible 00:11:35] was really interesting. And you, Lizzie?

Elizabeth English:

Sure. So also in that introduction, there was a talk from Professor Dennis [inaudible 00:11:46]. It’s really amazing to have world leaders like him talking at conferences like this. It’s fantastic. And obviously he’s one of the founders of the amyloid cascade hypothesis and his talk was largely about amyloid beta and its importance in generating Alzheimer’s pathology. But the most interesting part that I found out about it was some new unpublished data where they’d used cryo EM to look at fibrils in brain soaks. So, the past work has all been focused on the brain [inaudible 00:12:18], which contains a whole mixture of different proteins, whereas the socks we just think might be the soluble proteins that are extracted from the brain.

So, a different variety within the brain, but they’ve managed to pellet these proteins and they’ve found the same structures of the amyloid beta that they’ve found previously. And that’s completely new and very interesting and it does inform my work going forward as well. So, I don’t use cryo EM, I use super resolution for essence microscopy, but that should hopefully as well. We’ll see, we’ll see. Time will tell, but I’m hoping as well as those fibrils, I’ll see more soluble aggregates as well, which you can’t capture with cryo EM. So that’ll be interesting for me going forwards.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Amazing. Thank you.

Elizabeth English:

Thanks.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

So, would you like to share another highlight, David?

Dr David Koss:

Sure. We’ll go to my first love, which was tau pathology actually.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Nice.

Dr David Koss:

I was very interested in several of the talks actually in the tau immunotherapy session. And I think we’re now at this stage where we hear an awful lot about amyloid immunotherapy and there’s still a little bit of debate as to whether that’s really going to be effective or not. Although I would say that I think some of the evidence that we’re seeing now is very supportive that this could really be something very beneficial. But of course, with targeting beta amyloid, that’s extracellular. And so, when we’re trying to look at clearing intracellular tau pathology, there’s actually far more complications to the story of that. And I think that the session was led by Lou Blue from Bordeaux University and really, I think he did a really good job of introducing some of the key questions that people need to establish.

So, one, do we want to kind of target extracellular tau, or do we want to target intracellular tau? Is there a particular epitope that’s going to be more effective at clearing this? And actually, in terms of disease specificity, well we know that pathology in various tauopathies sometimes just involve the three R isoforms, but also the four R isoforms can be involved or Alzheimer’s, where you have a mixed isoform involvement. And so, you’re going to have to select which antibodies really carefully you’re going to use depending on which disease you want to target. What I thought was very interesting was the idea that you have obviously the kind of [inaudible 00:14:54] like spread of tau pathology, but even that, most of that’s not extracellular. It’s extracellular [inaudible 00:15:00] bound or it’s some tunneling nano tubes. And so really trying to get antibodies inside the cell is a main point of focus.

And they were able to show that actually moving away from conventional antibodies, we could use something like a nano body, which effectively a scaled down antibody. I think there was another term which I quite liked to call it; I think it was a MIDI body as well. I don’t think I’d ever heard that; it was quite nice. In any case, they were able to show that these antibodies were more readily taken up intracellularly and in fact there was even elements where you could put and package these antibodies into adeno-associated viruses so you could effectively deliver immunotherapy using gene therapy. And perhaps that’s something we want to consider when we’re kind of looking at trying to clear a tap that’s continuously building up. It’s going to be one of these things that you perhaps can’t necessarily have a vaccine against, or you can’t immunize against, but you can use the antibody as kind of ongoing treatment.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Okay.

Dr David Koss:

And I thought that was really exciting actually.

Elizabeth English:

That’s cool.

Speaker 6:

[inaudible 00:16:16]. It sounds really cool.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Yeah. Would you like to say a second highlight, Susan?

Dr Susan Mitchell:

Yeah, I feel like I’m just here for the blood, but I really enjoyed the symposiums and I think from my perspective, those symposiums offer a really nice high-level overview. And particularly coming from not being quite as close to the coalface of science of the science and research that’s happening, you kind of get a sense of what’s happening in a way which really just pulls it together and there’s so much happening in the blood world with all of these different interesting sort of areas and assays, which is it can be quite hard to keep up. So, I really enjoyed it, there was a session led with Jeff Cummings, Oscar Hansen, and Charlotte Tennison, apologies if I’ve butchered her surname. And I found it just really helpful to understand the areas of interest both in amyloid and tau. And I think that relationship with the tau plus the biomarkers is really intriguing and how they actually are probably clinically going to be most helpful.

And everyone seems to pretty much be putting their money on P tau 217 as that blood test of choice. And even just getting that is helpful to really get. You can read a paper but it’s in the room when you hear everyone go, “Yeah, I think that. I think that” which really helps you go, okay, that’s one we should really focus on. And from a policy perspective, that’s really helpful. ‘Cause actually you want to be able to go and say to people, that’s the blood test we need to try and implement and that’s why it’s going to matter. So that was really helpful for me. But I heard about new interests about relationships between P tau 386 and Total Tau. I hadn’t heard about it before P tau 205. These are all new numbers and again, it’s really interesting to kind of know which are the numbers of choice and what’s coming forward ahead.

And then as an aside from that, there’ve been other papers and posters I think just looking at even really basic stuff like time of day when you take your blood sample, if you’ve eaten something and all of these things are going to really matter and really matter when you’re actually putting this research into kind of real life. If that matters, we need to know about it because that’s going to radically change the results we get and its reliability. And so even nuggets like that I found really helpful to just think about, oh my goodness, there’s a lot to think about. So yeah, really interesting sessions and blood for me.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Awesome. Thank you very much. And you, Lizzie?

Elizabeth English:

Sure, I’ll stay on the topic of tax. We’ve had immunotherapy, we’ve had diagnosis.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Yes.

Elizabeth English:

So, a talk that we just had to quickly leave to come to the podcast, but it was Ina [inaudible 00:18:42], sorry if I’m pronouncing that wrong, but she talked about how tau aggregates might actually spread between cells, which was really interesting. And it apparently depends on a virus that’s embedded into the genome already rather than necessarily a virus that has infected people. So, I think they’re called HERS, human endogenous retroviruses. And these are repressed less with age. So, you have an increased probability of the tau aggregates spreading between your cells and therefore spreading Alzheimer’s disease, theoretically, if that indeed does link to the symptoms. So that was just a really interesting theory that I hadn’t heard before.

Dr David Koss:

That sounds incredible.

Elizabeth English:

It was amazing.

Dr David Koss:

I’ve never heard that before.

Elizabeth English:

No, I’d never heard that. I’d heard there might be a relationship between viruses and induction of inflammation in the brain, but in terms of aggregate spreading, it was really interesting. So, I’d recommend having a look at the recording.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Yeah, I made a note for that, to watch it on demand. Nice. Thank you, Lizzy. Does anyone else have something that particularly want to highlight?

Dr David Koss:

Yeah, I guess I’ve still got a few things that have really kind of taken my interest. I think one of the things, and actually I don’t think I’ve got the notes back here, but one of the things I was very interested in was [inaudible 00:20:07] and I think for a while that’s been really interesting and it’s been something that I suppose basic scientists like myself have been interested in because we hope that at some point through serial cases we might begin to understand if there’s a difference at the kind of anatomical point of origin for [inaudible 00:20:27] aggregation. So, whether that’s in the basal ganglia associated with Parkinson’s or whether that’s in the new cortex associated with dementia with Lewy bodies. And for a while it seemed like there’s some promising results with some [inaudible 00:20:42] that are capable of showing higher retention times in various [inaudible 00:20:49].

But I think my take home message from that was that really the progress has been made on multiple systems atrophy and these [inaudible 00:20:58] work very well in that. But interestingly not so well in Parkinson’s disease and in dementia with Louis bodies. And although it’s great to see the progress, I think it’s a little bit disappointing because really, at least as I understand from clinicians, what they would require is something to delineate dementia with Lewy bodies in an early stage with that of Alzheimer’s disease. And so having these kinds of tools that you would be able to do PET and to understand where the [inaudible 00:21:28] is depositing would be really beneficial for early-stage treatment. But I believe the talks did seem to end on a more positive note with some new candidates coming through that that seemed to be at least better in Parkinson’s disease. And so, I’d be really interested to see how that kind of follows up and develops.

Elizabeth English:

That’s interesting. I’ll piggyback off that. But in terms of the differences between the [inaudible 00:21:55], I’m an Alzheimer’s researcher primarily, but I have been to a few [inaudible 00:21:59] talks as we’ve gone through, and I know I keep bringing it back to basic science, but we’re keeping things varied. The structure of the aggregates they believe to be different between the different [inaudible 00:22:11], which is really interesting. I think that was Yang Yang’s talk with Shaw. [inaudible 00:22:16] labs cryo EM work. So, it could be depending on that, that might affect.

Dr David Koss:

Yeah, I think that is a challenge as well because obviously the different confirmations that [inaudible 00:22:30] kind of adopting is going to change how it interacts with the PET [inaudible 00:22:34].

Elizabeth English:

Absolutely.

Dr David Koss:

I also saw an approach to that using partial proteomic digestion and by using kind of weaker proteases that would break [inaudible 00:22:46] at different sites, depending on how it’s folded, it would be protected from those enzyme activities. And so, then it allowed people to understand whether that was uniform in different [inaudible 00:22:59] across different brain regions as well. And I thought that was, again, that was something that was very interesting.

Speaker 6:

Yeah, that is so neat. Thank you. Thank you both.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Hey, does anybody else have any more highlights to mention?

Elizabeth English:

Yes, I really enjoyed the plenary talk this morning. It was early. Had to get up very early.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

It was [inaudible 00:23:24], yes.

Elizabeth English:

But I was there. So, this was Dr. Melissa Murray’s talk, and this is about-

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

My clinic? Yes?

Speaker 6:

Yes.

Elizabeth English:

This was about neuropathology in the brain, which is really interesting to me. I’ve not worked on it personally, but it gives a nice context to all of the aggregate work that we do. And she just gave a very engaging talk, to be honest. I don’t know if anybody else attended the plenary.

Speaker 6:

Yeah, I did.

Elizabeth English:

But there was a choose your adventure and you got to vote on which presentation you wanted her to give. And-

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Yeah, one was a travel adventure on temporal changes and the other animation, adventure on special biology.

Elizabeth English:

Exactly.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

For what did you vote?

Elizabeth English:

I voted for the second one.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Did you vote the one-

Elizabeth English:

[Inaudible 00:24:04], which was chosen.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Yeah, me too. The one that was chosen. Yes. She actually prepared two presentations.

Elizabeth English:

Oh, impressive.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

So, the audience chose, so it was, yeah, it really nice. At the end, I actually wanted to ask her, can you present the other one too?

Elizabeth English:

Yeah, double bill, please.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Yeah, it was really good speaking.

Elizabeth English:

So, I really enjoyed it, and the results were very interesting as well, linking taut to phagocytosis and various toxicity mechanisms, which is important to consider. And I’ll be taking away with me lots of the tau antibody names to go and research for things I should be looking into as well.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Yes.

Speaker 6:

Before we wrap up, I wondered if you might like to briefly talk about the event. So, what do you like about this conference or what do you dislike about it?

Dr Susan Mitchell:

I’m happy to say I think it’s one of those big conferences. So, there’s lots of parallel sessions, which is great, but the fear of missing out can be significant.

Elizabeth English:

That’s real.

Dr Susan Mitchell:

And as ever, what the title is and that brief abstract does not tell you whether or not you’re going to get to choose your own adventure session, for example. And the sessions start early and run late. So, it’s quite a commitment to get to everything throughout the day.

Speaker 6:

During one session I had to change three rooms because it was neuro-inflammation, micro [inaudible 00:25:19], xeno transplantation works, xenographs that I want to work on. So, it was a bit challenging.

Dr Susan Mitchell:

And while there is an app, I don’t think it has particularly helped me plan my time. I haven’t been able to pull out my personal itinerary to go, well, I need to be here, here, and here, which would be nice.

Speaker 6:

Yeah. I haven’t booked a lot of the things.

Dr Susan Mitchell:

Yeah.

Speaker 6:

While I was… Yeah.

Dr David Koss:

Yeah. I think… Sorry-

Dr Susan Mitchell:

No, no.

Speaker 6:

[inaudible 00:25:38].

Dr Susan Mitchell:

There’s just a lot going on and I think it’s quite hard to, I think balance the big talks with also getting into the detail I’ve struggled with.

Dr David Koss:

Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned the app. I suppose if I were going to say a couple of things that could be improved on, I think perhaps the app would be one of them. It’s nice to have the app actually. Not every conference has an app, I suppose. So, it is good to have it, but I think often just even the kind of navigation and the use of it could be a little bit more refined. It’s a bit slow I think, and clunky, especially if you’re just pulling something up to run.

Speaker 6:

It’s updating every ten minutes.

Dr David Koss:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And particularly if you’re abroad as well and you’re [inaudible 00:26:30] to the wifi as well. It’s actually more data use as well. But I think things that I’ve really enjoyed, I think it’s the diversity of the subjects that have been on offer here. That’s been one thing that has been well represented. So, I think that’s been very interesting. It’s always really nice to have the conference, ADPD, where it’s actually not just focused on Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease. And I think again, and actually I’m not sure that I’ve seen that come through so much here, but we also have this growing understanding that there’s heterogeneity in the pathology that we’re seeing in many dementias. So, we really do need to be moving towards integrating the knowledge from multiple fields of various diseases so that we can truly understand the human condition rather than working in isolated sections. So, I think ADPD is really good for that.

Elizabeth English:

Absolutely. I’d agree with that. As someone who mostly does Alzheimer’s research, it’s important not to forget about all of the other things going on and how closely related they are with neurodegeneration patients often experiencing comorbidities as well. And how are those all-inter-play, we don’t really know yet. So, it’s good to get the big picture.

Speaker 6:

Thank you. Anything else that you disliked or liked about the conference?

Elizabeth English:

I’ll go for it, in terms of the main dislike that we’ve kind of agreed on between us. And it was right at the beginning of the conference as well, which was quite jarring to be honest, as we all sat down excited for a week of-

Speaker 6:

Yeah, you have to mention the opening as well.

Elizabeth English:

Yes.

Speaker 6:

The opening ceremony.

Elizabeth English:

True, true. There were some good things about the opening.

Speaker 6:

Yeah. There was an introduction by Queen Sylvia of Sweden opening the conference.

Elizabeth English:

That was exciting.

Speaker 6:

Yeah, it was exciting. And it was really nice, also. She said, yeah, her personal experience with the disease, with her mom and brother. And I also liked it, I think that it was really inspiring because said some words of encouragement, like she said that she never lost hope that we would one day beat the disease. So, I think that it was really nice. And then, you can continue.

Elizabeth English:

I hate to be the bringer of bad news, but it’s important to talk about.

Speaker 6:

It’s important I think, yes.

Elizabeth English:

So, the organizing committee for ADPD, it’s my first ADPD, so I don’t know if this has historically been the case, but the whole organizing committee were kind of leading the introduction and they all happened to look pretty much identical maybe with slightly different beards or mustaches, but they were all old white men. And in science in general, where it’s been historically so and kind of continues to be in some cases that white people dominate leadership. And then this was quite shocking to the audience of increasingly diverse people, I would argue to not have role models in the leadership that are representative of the audience. And it does seem quite exclusionary not to even have any sort of token diverse member. It just unfortunately wasn’t a consideration for them.

And that does make me think about, because they are the organizing committee, how they’ve organized the talks throughout the conference, whether they’ve considered diversity as a part of that. I would argue that it’s not hard, but it has been better than the organizing committee. There has been some diversity throughout the talks.

Speaker 6:

Absolutely, yes.

Elizabeth English:

But it’s still definitely something to improve on in future, I would say.

Dr David Koss:

I think, yeah, I want to, I guess pick up a little bit on that in the fact that yes, these are the people who have been on the organizing committee and clearly, they’ve spent many years working together and organizing these things.

Speaker 6:

Of course.

Dr David Koss:

And now as things are changing and things are hopefully improving, I think it just does seem very jarring. But your point about just even realizing how bad it would look, there should have been that discussion because it is; it’s an obvious one that as far as I’m aware, most people in the audience, that’s on their mind a lot now. And so perhaps it does show a little bit of a disconnect between, I suppose, the old guard and the new generations that are coming through. At the same time, it was nice to see that there was diversity in the junior faculty award winners as well, and that was very nice. So perhaps it’s just one of these things where some more self-awareness could have been implemented, I suppose.

Dr Susan Mitchell:

Well, I guess it depends on how that organizing committee is convened in the first place, doesn’t it?

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Of course. Yeah.

Dr Susan Mitchell:

And I think how do we challenge that to make sure that that’s intrinsically diverse from the start? ‘Cause that’s when you start to make the change and that then also would probably further diversify the kind of people that are speaking, presenting.

Dr David Koss:

Yeah, I think we see this repeatedly now where actually as you get further up it is the representation, the diversity, not just in terms of gender, but also in terms of race or variety of different disabilities and neurotypes as well, actually. It is just completely lost.

Dr Susan Mitchell:

And then I guess I appreciate much of this is at the basic research side, but apart from the Queen of Sweden, that lived experience is quite distant. And I’m not suggesting you need to have that in every session, but I think it’s always good to have chances to be reminded of what we’re trying to achieve here. And there are different ways of doing that. And I guess as ever, it’s always good at conferences to think about what that can look like. So that’s possibly a challenge to the conveners.

Speaker 6:

Yeah. I really enjoyed the UK meetings, the ambassador talks.

Dr Susan Mitchell:

Yeah.

Dr David Koss:

Yeah, yeah. No, I think that’s a really excellent point.

Speaker 6:

Puts everything in perspective. Yeah.

Dr David Koss:

Yeah, yeah. Particularly the recent UK meeting actually.

Speaker 6:

[inaudible 00:32:51].

Dr David Koss:

That was absolutely excellent.

Speaker 6:

That’s amazing.

Dr David Koss:

It was really very, very important to have someone talk about their experience with dementia.

Dr Susan Mitchell:

And I think also even, and it’s broader than that because it can be about how people are involved in research and why that matters. And there are different ways of doing that. And I appreciate it when you are using brain samples that are quite remote. But yeah, I think it’s always good to think about how you could do that differently.

Dr David Koss:

Yeah.

Speaker 6:

Yeah. I’d agree. [inaudible 00:33:19].

Dr Susan Mitchell:

I think my only other comment would be, obviously I think the farmer stands have the best coffee. And I’ve been trying to peruse and do an objective study across all of the companies that offer coffee. It’s far better than the standard coffee and only one of them has pastries.

Elizabeth English:

[inaudible 00:33:35]-

Dr David Koss:

Which is the best?

Elizabeth English:

… pastries.

Dr Susan Mitchell:

Yeah, well, okay. I’ve only sighted two so far, so I don’t feel I can give my full evidence results just yet.

Dr David Koss:

Okay.

Speaker 6:

It’s the one with the longest cue.

Dr David Koss:

Yeah. Well, that’s, yeah, that’s [inaudible 00:33:47]. Yeah.

Speaker 6:

Yeah.

Elizabeth English:

Okay. One more thing to bring up.

Speaker 6:

Yes?

Elizabeth English:

Because we’ve been talking about it a little bit, but I don’t think we’ve actually got it into the podcast yet. Just the poster organization, it’s very disorganized.

Dr David Koss:

Yeah.

Elizabeth English:

So as the abstract booklet stands, the numbers don’t link up with the poster board numbers, which is confusing for the people presenting the posters, but also anyone who looks through the abstracts and finds something interesting that they’d like to learn more about. So, this seems like quite a simple fix, hopefully for ADPDs going forward.

Speaker 6:

Yeah.

Dr David Koss:

Could I just… Sorry, could I just say whilst we’re talking about the posters, there’s one other element, which has happened now for two years in a row, which is to produce a physical poster in-

Speaker 6:

Portrait.

Dr David Koss:

… portrait, and then an online poster in landscape means you effectively produce two posters. And realistically, I can understand the physical constraints of presenting a poster in the real world, but online, I don’t understand why it has to be in a different orientation. You can have it as large and, in any orientation, you like, and it doesn’t matter because it’s online. And I think that that is a little bit frustrating for the organizers. And I know that that’s been fed back last year as well. So-

Elizabeth English:

Interesting.

Dr David Koss:

… hopefully moving forward, there’ll be an improvement in that.

Dr Susan Mitchell:

But it seems small, but actually when you’re producing that poster, to have to create two, it’s actually a huge amount of work.

Dr David Koss:

Yeah.

Dr Susan Mitchell:

And if you said, actually, if I’m looking at my phone, it’s worse being landscaped.

Dr David Koss:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dr Susan Mitchell:

True.

Dr David Koss:

Yeah. Very, very true. Yeah.

Dr Susan Mitchell:

It seems ridiculous.

Dr David Koss:

Yeah.

Speaker 6:

Yeah. You can always Zoom me and say what you want to say. Yeah, absolutely. I agree with that.

Elizabeth English:

I guess I hate to be the person bringing all the constructive criticism, but we’ve got to do it.

Speaker 6:

Yeah.

Elizabeth English:

I would say it was touched on a bit earlier by Susan, but the long days and with how kind of the sessions are structured, I would say it’s not the most accessible conference I’ve been to in terms of that. But also, other things as well. So, I’m a perfectly healthy and I’m not disabled in any way, but I’m exhausted just after one day of the conference. I can’t imagine what it’s like for some people here. So, I think they could consider that a bit more going forward as well.

And in terms of the common spaces as well, there’s not much seating, there’s not even many tables. So, it’s just little things like that that I think would make a huge difference to some people for next year.

Dr Susan Mitchell:

I’d agree with the seats. I think more places to sit down. You shouldn’t have to sit on the floor.

Elizabeth English:

No.

Dr Susan Mitchell:

And it is hard because it’s a big conference and that ebbs and flows and there’ll be pinch points when there’s a lot of people that want to see. But I think it’s small things like that that actually make a real difference to, as you said, how you can then refresh and enable yourself to make the most of the opportunities that are there.

Speaker 6:

Yeah. I had a conversation with people who [inaudible 00:36:46] on this kind of things and coffee, seating, and yeah.

Dr Susan Mitchell:

But those things matter, the food, those the basics, get those right in your hierarchy of needs and then your head is ready for all that innovative science.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

Yeah. So, the next question is what would you say to anyone listening who might be thinking of coming next year? So next year by the way, the conference takes place in Lisbon, so it’ll be March 2024 in Lisbon. So, would you suggest to people coming to conference?

Dr David Koss:

I love Lisbon. Lisbon is an amazing city and I think it is one of the nice things that we get to do where we get to go to various cities all over Europe and in fact all over the world, to not only share our ideas, but to also see a bit of the city. And so, it’s been really nice coming here. I’ve never been to Sweden before, really enjoyed it. And in Lisbon it might be sunny. So, I think that would be really quite exciting, I think to see a bit of sun in March. Yeah.

Elizabeth English:

Absolutely.

Speaker 6:

Yeah, that’s true.

Elizabeth English:

I’d agree. And as much as I’ve complained, I have enjoyed my experience. There’s been some amazing talks.

Speaker 6:

I know. I was joking. Yes, of course. Yeah.

Elizabeth English:

Amazing talks.

Speaker 6:

That was amazing.

Elizabeth English:

Yeah, going to conferences is great to learn about all of the things happening, but also to generate those new ideas that you can’t quite get from just reading papers on the internet.

Speaker 6:

That’s true.

Elizabeth English:

And I would say ADPD is the world leading conference for basic Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s research, but as Susan said, also the diagnosis side and the drug developments as well. So, it really is a fantastic conference and Lisbon’s great. So, I wouldn’t advise against it. Definitely consider it.

Speaker 6:

Yeah. I totally agree with you guys. And I think that, yeah, it’s very important and as you said, it’s not the same thing. Reading the papers and then, you can meet the person here and ask details about experiments, about a lot of different things or form new collaborators or collaboration, sorry. So, in fact, I’ve been collaborating with a team in the US and it’s the first time I saw them in person after three years. So that was amazing.

Elizabeth English:

That’s really exciting.

Speaker 6:

Yeah, it’s really nice. Yeah. So, it’s a good opportunity. Yeah, I had some stats here. There are 1100 posters.

Elizabeth English:

I’ve only looked at about [inaudible 00:39:21].

Speaker 6:

673 onsite talks, 346 on demand talks with over 4,000 participants from 60 countries.

Elizabeth English:

Impressive.

Speaker 6:

[inaudible 00:39:31] talks and 112 symposiums. So yeah.

Dr David Koss:

It’s fantastic.

Dr Susan Mitchell:

Big.

Speaker 6:

So probably have to go because we have a lot to do now.

Elizabeth English:

Yes.

Dr Susan Mitchell:

Yes.

Dr Nikoleta Daskoulidou:

So that’s all we have time for the day. We’re all going to [inaudible 00:39:45] this afternoon sessions now. I hope you enjoyed listening, and if you want to find out more about any of the research we discussed, head over to the ADPD website. The online portal is open for another 30 days and there may still be chances to register. Also, please stay tuned for part two of the podcast that will be recorded at the end of the conference.

Thank you to my fabulous guests, Lizzy English, Dr. Susan Mitchell, and Dr. David Koss. I’m Dr. Nikoleta Daskoulidou and you’ve been listening to the Dementia Researcher Podcast.

Voice Over:

Brought to you by Dementia Researcher.NIHR.ac.UK, in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK and Alzheimer’s Society supporting early career dementia researchers across the world.

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