New Diagnostics and Emerging Biomarkers for Alzheimer’s Disease

Research into Alzheimer’s disease has reached an extraordinary inflection point. Decades of research have yielded tractable therapeutic targets, resulting in drugs that have earned accelerated US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approvals. Biomarker research has been essential in driving therapeutic advances.

Over the last decade, an array of biomarkers to identify, classify, stage and monitor Alzheimer’s disease patients have been discovered and studied resulting in clinically useful, cost-effective and less invasive diagnostic methods to expedite clinical trials and identify Alzheimer’s disease faster and more accurately. With the establishment of the ATN research framework for biomarkers of Amyloid, Phospho-Tau and Neurodegeneration in 2018, a paradigm for understanding the relationship between various biomarkers and disease biology/pathology has emerged, enabling advancements in Alzheimer’s disease biomarker and therapeutic research. This has led to new blood-based biomarker solutions for drug development trials and clinic use.

This webinar will review the current landscape of Alzheimer’s disease biomarkers and diagnostics. The featured speakers will discuss blood-based biomarkers and also highlight emerging biomarkers, such as GFAP and YKL40 that may supplement the core ATN panel to further enhance the understanding of, and the ability to identify and differentiate neurodegenerative diseases.

Speakers

Robert Martone, Associate Director, Biomarker Solution Center, Labcorp

Robert Martone is a research scientist with deep expertise in neurodegeneration, neuro-oncology, biomarkers and drug discovery. He investigated hereditary neuropathies and the molecular biology of the blood-brain barrier at Columbia University and subsequently managed a portfolio of drug discovery programs at Wyeth Neuroscience targeting Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. He was the neuroscience therapeutic area lead for the Labcorp Biomarker Center of Excellence and later established a protein biomarker laboratory at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. More recently, he was Director of Preclinical Research at Cognition Therapeutics and later supported late-stage biomarker and diagnostics efforts at Biogen. He is currently an Associate Director supporting neurology biomarkers at the Labcorp Biomarker Solution Center.

Message Presenter

Joe Volpe, PhD, Business Segment and Scientific Discipline Director, Neurology, Labcorp

Joe Volpe graduated from Duke University in 2008 with a PhD in computational immunology. Upon graduating, he worked as a Medical Science Liaison at Monogram Biosciences, a Labcorp subsidiary, where he covered the Southeast and Midwest territories. In early 2018, Joe began working on building Labcorp’s Neurology program, for which he is now the Scientific Discipline Director and the Business Segment Director. He is a two-time Labcorp Chairman’s Award winner (2021 and 2011) and was also the Monogram Biosciences MVP awardee in 2011. He is a member of the American Academy of Neurology (AAN).

Message Presenter

John W. Winslow, PhD, Associate Vice President of Research and Development, Labcorp (Monogram)

John Winslow is Associate Vice President of R&D at Labcorp-Monogram and heads a group that is responsible for the innovation, development and validation of diagnostic and clinical study assays supporting biomarker-guided neurology and oncology patient treatment and drug development. He also contributes to multiple R&D committees and project teams assessing emerging technologies for further evaluation and implementation. John is an active member of several scientific organizations and frequently presents results from collaborative biomarker assay development and translational studies. Dr. Winslow has more than 25 years of biotechnology and biopharmaceutical experience, having joined Labcorp in 2009, and is a co-author of more than 60 peer-reviewed scientific publications and 20 issued patents.

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