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. There are several FDA-approved drugs for treating the disease, with another just around the corner. 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 give an inside look 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 new technologies, including Alamar’s NULISAseq CNS Disease Panel, 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 his summary of the field, Zetterberg ends with an appeal to the European Medical Agency: approve these new drugs. They’re working.

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EUVC #235 Robin Godenrath, Picus Capital

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