UCSF dementia experts to affix peers at annual Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s disease conference

Dementia experts from UC San Francisco will join their peers from across the globe on the annual Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease (CTAD) conference in Boston from Oct. 24 to 27.

Presentations cover breakthroughs in therapies that clear amyloid – a trademark of Alzheimer’s – and a symposium on patients with early Alzheimer’s symptoms who were treated with the anti-amyloid medication donanemab, which could also be approved by the tip of the 12 months. Other topics include novel treatments, diagnostic blood biomarkers, amyloid-related imaging abnormalities (ARIA) and Medicare coverage.

This 12 months’s keynotes will address disease modifying treatments, learn how to develop more equitable and valid trials, emerging therapies, Alzheimer’s prevention studies, and ARIA in mice and its implications in people.

CTAD brings together leaders from academic research centers, patient advocacy groups, international research coalitions and pharmaceutical corporations.

UCSF presentations include the next:

• Charles Windon, MD, will present Race and Sex Effects on Rates of Amyloid-Positivity in Real-World Memory Care. Using data from 17,000 participants enrolled within the IDEAS study, Windon and colleagues checked out PET scans in female and African American, Latino and Asian individuals, to guage ethnocultural and sex differences in amyloid rates. The presentation is a component of a symposium starting at 4:55 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, Oct. 24. Windon will likely be joined by Gil Rabinovici, MD, senior creator of the study.

• Renaud La Joie, PhD, will present Quantitative Amyloid-PET in Real-World Practice. Amyloid PET scans are required to make sure that patients who’ve or could also be developing symptoms of dementia are candidates for anti-amyloid therapies like lecanemab (Leqembi). On this study, La Joie and colleagues quantified amyloid deposits from greater than 10,000 PET scans taken from clinical settings within the IDEAS study, quite than academic settings, which follow strict protocols, to see if readings were consistent with the scans. The presentation takes place at 11 a.m. EDT on Friday, Oct. 27. La Joie will likely be joined by Gil Rabinovici, MD, senior creator of the study.

• Rachel Nosheny, PhD, will present Establishing the Validity of a Novel Electronic Clinical Dementia Rating. Many older adults who’ve cognitive impairment, or who’re liable to getting it, go undiagnosed. Nosheny and colleagues tested the validity of an electronic version of the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR), which screens for and determines the stages of dementia. The eCDR could be self-administered. The presentation takes place at 11:30 a.m. EDT on Friday, Oct. 27. Nosheny will likely be joined by Yan Li, PhD, of Washington University, St. Louis, senior creator of the study.

• Also present will likely be Adam Boxer, MD, PhD, principal investigator and project leader of the Alzheimer’s Tau Platform trial, which received a $151 million grant from the National Institute on Aging. The trial will mix an anti-amyloid therapy with tau therapies, the primary of its kind for late-onset Alzheimer’s, essentially the most common type of dementia.