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Boston University

Rhoda Au, PhD | Massachusetts, United States

Boston University

Rhoda Au, PhD | Massachusetts, United States

2023 Annual Goodes Prize for Excellence in Alzheimer's Drug Discovery: Validation of a Globally Scalable AD Screening Tool: A/T/dN

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) progresses slowly over years, even decades of time. New blood-based biomarkers for AD are now becoming available that can detect whether AD is present in the brain and do so at low cost, including in a primary care doctor’s office.  But having AD in the brain does not always mean that the clinical symptoms of the disease will emerge.  Some people die with lots of AD in their brain but remained cognitively intact throughout their life. Thus, being biomarker positive for AD does not mean that memory loss, the most common clinical symptom of AD, will occur.  Recently new AD drug treatments have been approved with more likely to be approved as their finish their clinical trial testing.  Most of these drugs will be most effective if they are given in the earliest stages of the disease.  Determining who should and should not be getting these drug treatments is unlikely to be based on AD blood-based biomarkers alone without any sign of a clinical symptom.  This project proposes to pilot test a new AD screening tool that combines AD blood-based biomarker measures from a finger-prick test with cognitive tests given on a smartphone.