Well, to me, the most important advances are not, although they are intimately related, but to me, the most important advances come from the therapeutic field, right? So the new anti-amyloid therapies, right? That proved to be effective, even though the amount of disease modification is relatively modest, right, these are the first drugs that convincingly slow disease progression, right. This is just the beginning, right, so there will be more therapies, anti-amyloids...
Well, to me, the most important advances are not, although they are intimately related, but to me, the most important advances come from the therapeutic field, right? So the new anti-amyloid therapies, right? That proved to be effective, even though the amount of disease modification is relatively modest, right, these are the first drugs that convincingly slow disease progression, right. This is just the beginning, right, so there will be more therapies, anti-amyloids. We also know now that we are starting to see promising results with anti-tau therapies as well. So potentially, yeah, we can actually improve patient care by using these new therapies in clinical practice. So to me, that’s the most important advance in the field that will last five to 10 years.
On the other hand, on my side, the biomarkers side, To be effective when applying these therapies, it is crucial to appropriately classify the patients, right? To understand whether these patients can benefit from the therapy, right? So for instance, in anti-amyloid therapy, we want to make sure that these patients actually have amyloid, right? So for this, we have amyloid PET. We have the new plasma biomarkers that can help us to, in a scalable way, to, yeah, probably screen for those that are at highest risk of having amyloid pathology. And on the other hand, to me, it’s also very important, the role of tau PET, right, that we will have in the next few years, right, because we are learning now that the presence of amyloid by itself is not enough to understand whether the symptoms that the patient has are actually caused by Alzheimer’s disease, right? So tau PET can help us to increase the confidence that the symptoms that the patient is experiencing are actually caused by Alzheimer’s disease pathology, right? And if it’s caused by Alzheimer’s disease pathology, therapeutics that are targeting AD pathology will be more effective in these patients, right? Rather than applying an anti-amyloid therapy to a patient who has amyloid pathology, but it’s not causing any symptoms plus something else, right? This is not going to work. And that’s why we see so much heterogeneity in clinical trajectories and also response to the therapies. So yeah, in summary, yeah, just therapeutic advances. Having therapies is by far the most important for patients, right? And on the other hand, the developments in biomarkers will help us to understand which patients will benefit from the therapies and at what specific disease stage.
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