Researchers from the Indiana University School of Medicine continue to have a strong presence at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference, held this year in London, United Kingdom. IU scientists are showcasing more than 180 presentations at the four-day event.
The annual conference, which runs July 12-15, is the premier international meeting dedicated to advancing Alzheimer's disease and related dementia research. The world’s leading scientists, researchers, clinicians and more gather each year at the event to share research discoveries that will lead to improvements in diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.
IU researchers are presenting posters and led research talks, sessions and exhibits at the conference, demonstrating the school’s comprehensive Alzheimer’s disease research program.
Jeff Dage, PhD, senior research professor of neurology, and Donna Wilcock, PhD, the Barbara and Larry Sharpf Professor of Alzheimer's Disease Research, each hosted pre-conference workshops July 10-11; the National Centralized Repository for Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (NCRAD), led by Tatiana Foroud, PhD, executive associate dean for research affairs, has an exhibit at the event.
Paul Territo, PhD, professor of medicine, is one of the few IU scientists giving a featured research session at the conference. These sessions debut and discuss innovative and impactful research findings. Territo presented findings on July 13 showing how a therapeutic for Alzheimer’s disease currently in clinical trials shows a statistically significant slowing of cognitive decline across brain networks in people with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease.
"Alzheimer's disease is not simply a disease of individual brain regions – it is a disease of disrupted brain networks. Memory and other cognitive and daily functions depend on the ability of neurons to communicate as an integrated system," Territo said. "By measuring how these networks perform in terms of efficiency, and how these quantitative measures change with time and by sex, we can gain a deeper understanding of the biological effects of a therapy and obtain measures of brain function that are as closely related to cognition as currently possible."
Territo and Juan Antonio Chong Chie, PhD, postdoctoral research fellow in the Territo lab, previously developed a way to read the brain’s "energy network patterns," revealing insights into the progression of Alzheimer's disease. The research team uses a method called metabolic functional connectomics, which implements graph theory to build "metabolic network maps.”
The team partnered with PharmatrophiX, a biopharmaceutical company pioneering the development of disease-modifying drugs targeting neurodegenerative diseases, to analyze data from 159 participants in a Phase 2a trial of the company’s lead drug candidate, LM11A-31.
“LM11A-31 is designed to protect the synapses – the connections between neurons – that enable the brain to function as an integrated network. What makes these findings particularly important is that advances in brain imaging and network analysis now allow us to measure the activity of those networks directly in living patients," said Frank M. Longo, MD, PhD, co-founder of PharmatrophiX.
At the conference, Territo presented that the research team found that LM11A-31 was associated with dose-dependent effects in whole-brain metabolic connectivity, network efficiency and functional brain systems linked to cognitive domains such memory and other functions, with the strongest effects observed in participants receiving a higher dose of the drug.
The team also discovered sex-dependent brain network patterns among clinical trial participants, similar to Territo’s previous findings; male and female Alzheimer's disease patients exhibit different brain network patterns over time, with women having a more fragmented network structure. Nearly two-thirds of Americans living with the disease are women, according to the Alzheimer’s Association, and among those, women progress at a faster rate than men.
