News

This collaborative effort between UCL, Washington University, and pharmaceutical companies such as AbbVie, Biogen, Bristol Myers Squibb and Roche aims to better understand the structure and role of NfL across different neurodegenerative diseases, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.

A worldwide clinical trial aimed at finding treatments for Alzheimer’s disease has expanded to include investigational drugs targeting a harmful form of the brain protein tau. 

News-Medical spoke to Dr. Randall Bateman and Dr. Nicolas Barthélemy from Washington University about their research on Alzheimer’s disease, and their new technique that can detect Alzheimer’s from a blood test.

Two decades or more before symptoms arise, plaques of a sticky protein called amyloid begin forming in the brains of people later diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown that levels of a specific protein in the blood rise as amyloid plaques form in the brain. […]

While a suite of new CSF markers has entered a mature stage where they get validated with identical methods in large international cohorts, much newer blood tests are catching up fast. Scientists are pushing the limits of detection of the core AD markers in plasma, and in the process are cracking open what used to […]

In the short space of two years, the erstwhile fantasy of a blood test for Alzheimer’s disease has become reality. Or so it seems. At the 2017 Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in London, Randall Bateman, Washington University, St. Louis, had wowed the audience by showing how an exquisitely sensitive mass spectroscopy assay of plasma detected a […]

How do you stop Alzheimer’s disease without a simple way to diagnose it? It’s a real chicken and egg problem, as I wrote last year on TGN. Discovering a treatment for Alzheimer’s requires lots of clinical trials for new drugs—but it’s difficult to enroll participants without a way to identify people who have the disease early […]

It seems blood tests for Aβ have moved off the wish list and are becoming reality—almost. Building a knowledge base for plasma measures as a proxy for brain amyloid, multiple methods applied to different research cohorts are now consistently linking low plasma Aβ42/40 to clinical, cognitive, and biomarker evidence of Alzheimer’s disease. 

A lot can happen in a year. At the 2017 Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in London, Randall Bateman’s team at Washington University in St. Louis wowed the crowd with a blood assay for Aβ that predicted brain amyloid with previously unattainable specificity and sensitivity (Jul 2017 conference news).