Novel biomarkers for improving diagnostics, prognostics, and treatments of Alzheimer’s disease

Introduction

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia and a major global health challenge. AD has a long pre-symptomatic phase spanning several decades. The accuracy of clinical AD diagnostics is mediocre, especially in primary care. This results in suboptimal treatment and care, which is especially problematic in light of emerging anti-amyloid therapies. ADVANCE-AD aims to revolutionize AD diagnostics and prognostics and fast-track the development of new effective therapies by using novel blood-based biomarkers for beta-amyloid, tau, neurodegeneration, and neuroinflammation.

Objectives

Transforming Clinical Work-up

First, my team will transform the clinical work-up of symptomatic AD patients globally by developing scalable, non-invasive, and cost-effective diagnostic and prognostic algorithms based on novel blood-based biomarkers and digital tools.

Pre-symptomatic Phase Interventions

Second, disease-modifying therapies should be initiated already in the pre-symptomatic phase to be very effective. My team will therefore develop cost-effective diagnostic algorithms to:

1. Identify AD pathology in individuals without cognitive symptoms.
2. Detect those most likely to develop symptoms and thereby benefit from new therapies.

These new algorithms will then be used to recruit individuals into a pre-symptomatic trial-ready cohort to efficiently evaluate new anti-AD drugs.

Identifying New Drug Candidates

Third, new drug candidates for our trial-ready cohort will be identified using large-scale analyses of the novel AD-related biomarkers in biobanked longitudinal blood samples from already performed randomized placebo-controlled trials. Using this high risk/high-gain approach, we will evaluate if different classes of existing drugs (e.g., statins, GLP-1 agonists, anti-inflammatory agents) can halt the development of AD and neurodegeneration. Finally, a novel genetic anti-tau treatment will be evaluated in this trial-ready cohort.

Conclusion

ADVANCE-AD builds on world-leading research and will likely result in breakthroughs in early diagnostics and treatments for AD.