The reduction in dementia risk caused by the shingles vaccine has us wondering how!?!? The mystery continues: Data from 3884 participants in the Health and Retirement Study suggest metrics of biological aging, including inflammation, are also improved by the vaccine. tinyurl.com/tuprm4nb

Association between shingles vaccination and slower biological aging: Evidence from a U.S. population-based cohort study

Abstract. There is growing interest in whether adult vaccines such as shingles vaccine may slow biological aging beyond preventing acute infections. Using

tinyurl.com

Disappointingly, the latozinemab trial for FTD-GRN failed to meet clinical endpoints (tinyurl.com/5f33sd88). However, the biomarker endpoint of elevated plasma PGRN was achieved. Perhaps PGRN localization to the lysosome, not extracellular fluids, is more critical for FTD-GRN (see PMID: 39565694).

Alector Announces Topline Results from Latozinemab Phase 3 Trial in Individuals with Frontotemporal Dementia Due to a GRN Mutation and Provides Business Update

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Oct. 21, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Alector, Inc. (Nasdaq: ALEC), a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on developing...

tinyurl.com

Fantastic development from AC Immune: 2 promising small molecules for detecting TDP-43 pathology using PET imaging. There's currently no way to detect TDP-43 pathology in living patients with dementia or ALS. Could have a huge impact on future clinical trials. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Excellent reporting from Corinne Purtill on frontotemporal dementia. "When someone is not who they were, think neurology before psychology” www.yahoo.com/news/article...

'I lost me': How frontotemporal dementia changed a mind and a marriage

A Westlake Village man living with frontotemporal dementia has something few people with the condition do: the ability to describe his disease.

yahoo.com

Excellent reporting from NYT on the science of diagnosing CTE (and other tauopathies) in postmortem brain. www.nytimes.com/interactive/... 🧪

Gunman in Manhattan Shooting Claimed to Have CTE. How Do Doctors Search for It? (Gift Article)

summary

nytimes.com

Fantastic story about how NIH funding helped transform an unexpected hypothesis into a scientific breakthrough and a successful commercial biomarker assay for the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease and related disorders: www.ninds.nih.gov/about-ninds/75th-anniversary/cnd-life-sciences 🧪

A Breakthrough Beneath the Skin

How a bold idea and smart federal investment created jobs, built a company, and is helping diagnose Americans in all 50 states.

ninds.nih.gov

Over 3 decades of NIH-supported research enabled the FDA approval of Tofersen (Qalsody®), offering new hope for people with SOD1-related ALS. This breakthrough was made possible by unwavering, long-term societal commitment! Timeline here: www.ninds.nih.gov/about-ninds/...

Tofersen (Qalsody®) - Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive and ultimately fatal neurodegenerative disorder that affects motor neurons responsible for initiating and controlling voluntary muscle movement and...

ninds.nih.gov

Progress with rapid & accessible biomarkers of neurodegeneration! Fujirebio received FDA clearance for a blood assay that predicts amyloid plaque pathology associated with Alzheimer's disease. The assay measures the plasma ratio of pTau217:β-Amyloid1-42. www.fujirebio.com/en-us/news-e... 🧪

Fantastic series on the genetics of ALS from @thelancetneuro.bsky.social. Understanding these genetic subtypes will help therapeutic development for ALS and FTD. tinyurl.com/544kx3fu

We are so excited for this year's AFTD Education conference! Come meet us in person, this Thursday and Friday. We have a table! See you all there ❤️ @theaftd.bsky.social #curemaptftd #maptftd #ftd

We need biomarkers to detect TDP-43 loss-of-function in plasma! This will make earlier therapeutic interventions possible for many neurodegenerative diseases. Here's a funding opportunity from AMP ALS if you have a great idea: fnih.org/wp-content/u...

What's the easiest thing a 50+ yo could do to decrease their chances of getting dementia? getting the shingles vaccine! ~20% reduction over 7 years. Given the current lack of treatment/prevention options, this is a big reduction. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/h...

Shingles Vaccine Can Decrease Risk of Dementia, Study Finds (Gift Article)

A growing body of research suggests that preventing the viral infection can help stave off cognitive decline.

nytimes.com

Exciting back-to-back papers in @cp-neuron.bsky.social ! The combined work supports a prion-like mechanism for TDP-43 aggregation and cell-to-cell transfer. Once initiated, aggregated TDP-43 triggers LOF and GOF events. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Seeded aggregation of TDP-43 induces its loss of function and reveals early pathological signatures

TDP-43 pathology characterizes neurodegenerative diseases. Scialò et al. use in vitro-generated and patient-derived TDP-43 aggregates as seeds to show that seed-induced TDP-43 cytoplasmic aggregation ...

cell.com

A patient was diagnosed with corticobasal syndrome. BUT, neuropath exam showed frontotemporal atrophy with a-synuclein glial cytoplasmic inclusions and neuronal cytoplasmic inclusions. By cryoEM, the a-syn fibers look just like MSA fibers. Authors conclude "FTLD-synuclein" is a rare MSA subtype

cryoEM papers@cryoempapers.bsky.social · last yr.

Identical Seeding Characteristics and Cryo-EM Filament Structures in FTLD-Synuclein and Typical Multiple System Atrophy pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40135351/ #cryoEM

The false morel mushroom is a suspect in this Swiss ALS cluster mystery. www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...

An ‘Impossible’ Disease Outbreak in the Alps

In one tiny town, more than a dozen people were diagnosed with the rare neurodegenerative disease ALS. Why?

theatlantic.com

Genetic carriers of a variant of early-onset Alzheimer's disease who were treated for 8 years (avg.) with an amyloid beta-directed antibody called gantenerumab had a 50% reduction in developing cognitive symptoms. 🧪 medicine.washu.edu/news/anti-am...

Anti-amyloid drug shows signs of preventing Alzheimer’s dementia | WashU Medicine

Clinical trial of people destined to develop early-onset Alzheimer’s disease shows eliminating amyloid from brain may prevent symptoms, supports need for confirmatory studies

medicine.washu.edu

NfL beats GFAP in a head-to-head FTD biomarker competition. Gendron et al. show plasma GFAP and NfL correlate with FTD disorder severity; however, NfL outperforms GFAP as a prognostic biomarker and potential susceptibility marker. molecularneurodegeneration.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Comprehensive cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons of plasma glial fibrillary acidic protein and neurofilament light across FTD spectrum disorders - Molecular Neurodegeneration

Background Therapeutic development for frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is hindered by the lack of biomarkers that inform susceptibility/risk, prognosis, and the underlying causative pathology. Blood gli...

molecularneurodegeneration.biomedcentral.com

Super happy to announce the latest work from my lab together with Hemali Phatnani @nygenome.org & NYGC ALS Consortium! We've combined ALS patient profiling (100s!), ML classifiers and matched bulk/single-cell data to dive into ALS Molecular Subtypes #NIHfundedResearch www.cell.com/cell-reports...

ALS molecular subtypes are a combination of cellular and pathological features learned by deep multiomics classifiers

O’Neill et al. present a deep exploration of molecular subtypes in ALS postmortem tissues from the NYGC ALS Consortium. Matched bulk and single-cell profiles demonstrate that ALS subtypes are a combin...

cell.com

Everything ALS is developing a study for monitoring and early detection of motor and speech changes. They're looking for participants who are gene carriers of ALS and are currently Asymptomatic. www.everythingals.org/asymptomatic...

Fantastic funding opportunity from AFTD to develop biomarkers for FTLD! $250,000 - $700,000 for 2 years! Better biomarkers will make diagnosis faster and help get patients into clinical trials. www.theaftd.org/for-research...

Fantastic funding opportunity from @theaftd.bsky.social to develop biomarkers for FTLD! $250,000 - $700,000 for 2 years! Better biomarkers will make diagnosis faster and help get patients into clinical trials. Please apply! www.theaftd.org/for-research...

FTD Biomarkers | AFTD

See Active FTD Biomarkers Initiative Award Recipients

theaftd.org

A reminder of the significance of multi-pathology in neurogenerative disorders. Imaging and fluid biomarkers are needed for clinical trial stratification.

Melissa E. Murray@drneurochic.bsky.social · last yr.

Excited to see this review of tau and TDP-43 come out, great to work with @lemwisse.bsky.social @relajoie.bsky.social and Bill Jagust 🤩🎉 alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

A two-and-a-half-year-old girl shows no signs of a rare genetic disorder, after becoming the first person to be treated for the motor-neuron condition while in the womb. https://go.nature.com/41rTube

Rare genetic disorder treated in womb for the first time

Nature - The child, who is now almost three years old, shows no signs of the often fatal motor neuron disease.

go.nature.com

Check out our new review of C9orf72 ALS in @thelancetneuro.bsky.social with Sarah Mizielinska, Rosa Rademakers and others! Was fun to co-write but tough to collate such incredible progress into a one article: authors.elsevier.com/c/1ke765FFzL...

Wow! Could be huge for biomarkers. AI tool uses six machine-learning models to analyze gene sequences encoding key regions in B-cell and T-cell receptors and pick out patterns associated with particular diseases.

Nature@nature.com · last yr.

In a study involving >500 people, the AI identified a range of infections and health conditions, as well as whether participants had received a flu vaccine. https://go.nature.com/4gPUpGT

A patient with a PSEN2 mutation should have had early dementia onset but didn't! Despite a high amyloid plaque burden there was limited tau pathology. Authors suggest tau pathology is the driver of dementia onset. Putative protective gene variants: FAM1515B, CEP290, GPCPD1, PRICKLE3, ANKRD36C.

Nature@nature.com · last yr.

A man who seemed genetically destined to develop Alzheimer’s disease while still young has reached his mid-70s without any cognitive decline ― in only the third recorded case of such resistance to the disease https://go.nature.com/4hUfvVy

Really appreciated Mike's expertise on NIH policies.

Science Magazine@science.org · last yr.

Michael Lauer, head of the external grantmaking program at the National Institutes of Health, has announced his retirement. scim.ag/4hZnVLA

Excellent summary of potential therapeutic development for frontotemporal dementia resulting from granulin mutations. www.nature.com/articles/s41587-025-02562-7

"Drug commercialization cannot exist unless basic research takes place... the most financially and clinically successful drugs weren’t discovered with a specific application in mind. Instead, they emerged from fundamental scientific inquiry." www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Eirini Vamva on LinkedIn: #blockbusters #pharmaceutical #pharma #biotech #acquisitions #academic… | 30 comments

This weekend, I took some time to analyze the biggest #blockbusters in the #pharmaceutical industry. My goal? I was curious to determine what percentage of… | 30 comments on LinkedIn

linkedin.com

Intriguing biomarker data using the NULISA platform on 86 ALS plasma samples. As expected, NEFL levels were higher in ALS samples, but tau and phospho-tau species (pTau181, pTau217, pTau231) were also elevated relative to healthy controls. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....