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

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia and a major global health challenge. 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.

I aim 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.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.Second, disease-modifying therapies should be initiated already in the pre-symptomatic phase to be very effective.

We will therefore develop cost-effective diagnostic algorithms to identify AD pathology in individuals without cognitive symptoms, and prognostic algorithms to detect those most likely to develop symptoms and thereby benefit from new therapies.Third, new drug candidates 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 approach, we will evaluate if different classes of existing drugs (e.g. GLP-1 agonists, anti-inflammatory agents) can halt development of AD and neurodegeneration.