The grant, awarded through the NIH’s National Institute on Aging, is the largest that Lund University has won in competition from a US funder to date. The five-year project will be carried out together with Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Alabama, with patient cohorts in Sweden and the US.

The grant, awarded through the NIH’s National Institute on Aging, is the largest that Lund University has won in competition from a US funder to date.

“It’s a great pleasure to receive this grant to carry out such a clinically significant project for a large and vulnerable group of patients,” says Sebastian Palmqvist, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Lund University.

The blood tests used in clinics today are based on the biomarker p-tau217. It detects Alzheimer’s-related changes many years before symptoms appear, so a positive result does not confirm that the disease is causing a patient’s current symptoms. MTBR-tau243 instead reflects the tau tangles that build up in the brain as symptoms develop.

“If the test is positive, we know that the disease has progressed to the point where it can explain the symptoms,” says Palmqvist.

By combining the two biomarkers and measuring them over time, the researchers also aim to predict how the disease will progress. The long-term ambition is a staging system for Alzheimer’s similar to the one used in cancer care, to give patients a prognosis and guide the choice of treatment.