So we’re entering a completely new era where biomarkers are truly transforming how we detect, diagnose, and ultimately treat Alzheimer’s disease. If we look at how biomarkers have transformed the care of other diseases, we can point to how cholesterol testing truly revolutionized heart disease prevention. And for Alzheimer’s disease, blood tests are really doing the same, something that was unimaginable just a decade ago...
So we’re entering a completely new era where biomarkers are truly transforming how we detect, diagnose, and ultimately treat Alzheimer’s disease. If we look at how biomarkers have transformed the care of other diseases, we can point to how cholesterol testing truly revolutionized heart disease prevention. And for Alzheimer’s disease, blood tests are really doing the same, something that was unimaginable just a decade ago. As I mentioned previously, today there are now two FDA-approved blood tests, and there are more on the way thanks to the advances in these biomarkers. So these tools are important not only for the diagnosis of patients, but also for accelerating drug development. Biomarkers allow us to identify the right patients for running clearer, faster, and more definitive clinical trials. And this is a major reason we now have multiple approved drugs, as well as a growing pipeline of next-generation therapies. So we’re looking not just at blood, but also the ability to combine blood with digital and speech biomarkers. And this will give us a fuller and more precise picture of each patient. We recently launched the Diagnostic Accelerator 3.0 fund, which we are focusing on moving beyond tests for amyloid pathology to identify biomarkers that differentiate tau and other mixed pathologies that are clearly occurring in patients with dementia. So advances will enable new diagnostic approaches, including multi-marker panels and AI-driven tools, and this will help accelerate the development of more effective and individualized treatments. I am incredibly excited about the development of speech biomarkers. We know that there are subtle changes in someone’s speech, like word choice and sentence structure, and these can reveal cognitive decline long before traditional symptoms are noticed. At ADDF, we have spearheaded a study called SpeechDX, which is harnessing the power of AI in everyday technologies, like the smartphone that you carry with you everywhere. And this can be used to detect, monitor, and prevent Alzheimer’s disease. So this will give us the power to know years in advance who will develop Alzheimer’s and when. And speech recordings are a non-invasive and easily collected way to be able to identify these changes in speech that occur. And this can be done through the widespread and affordable use of microphones that are found in everyday devices. So this will allow us to enhance accessibility for Alzheimer’s screenings.
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