Absolutely. We just published a paper about two weeks ago at German Neurology in which we took more than 200 cases from the Biobank for Aging Studies at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. And I was talking about having a strength, right? So in São Paulo, Brazil, autopsy is mandatory. So we had the possibility to put together a brain bank that’s population-based. We get all sorts of people there...
Absolutely. We just published a paper about two weeks ago at German Neurology in which we took more than 200 cases from the Biobank for Aging Studies at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. And I was talking about having a strength, right? So in São Paulo, Brazil, autopsy is mandatory. So we had the possibility to put together a brain bank that’s population-based. We get all sorts of people there. And this is where we can really see how much of this pathology we have in the population. Does it make a difference, men and women, age? Is there any genetic factor like APOE that interferes with this? So when we finally got to these numbers over 200, so we had enough numbers to compare, we started to ask these questions and we found something very interesting. That there is a big difference in the chances of men and women to have deposits of amyloid in the brain. And especially if they are from different ancestries. So women always have more amyloid than men. But white women are the ones that have the most amount of amyloid in the brain, followed by white men, followed by black women, followed by black men. And when we put APOE into the mix, we see that APOE influences much more amyloid in white people than in black people. And it does make a difference because imagine we are having a biomarker, right? Let’s go back to biomarker. And you have to decide what is the minimum threshold. It’s a value that we say this test is positive because there is more signal than chances to have noise. Now imagine you are testing a black man that tends to have low amyloid. They will always be negative. So maybe this is part of why we could not recruit them for clinical trials because they were never meeting the threshold. So when we know this data from pathology, then we can adjust better our biomarkers because we know what we are looking at and have more educated decisions on the next steps in living patients.
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