Nicholas Seyfried
Emory University, GA·Biochemistry
Dementia diagnoses today rely heavily on symptoms. A blood or spinal fluid test that reflected what is happening in the brain could catch disease earlier and track whether treatments work.
- Fields
Biochemistry
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
Lewy body dementia
dementia with Lewy bodies
Parkinson's disease dementia
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Apr 2030
What they work on
- Build a longitudinal Lewy body dementia registry under the Parkinson's Disease Biomarker Program, collecting clinical data and biospecimens to support validation of protein biomarkers.
- Define the corticolimbic network proteome of Lewy body dementia, mapping protein changes in memory- and emotion-related brain regions with network-based proteomics.
- Integrate brain, cerebrospinal fluid and plasma proteomes to find biofluid proteins that reflect brain dysfunction in LBD, then validate them over time with targeted proteomics.
- Run standardized genetic tests and CSF and plasma Alzheimer's biomarker assays, and evaluate emerging biomarkers across diverse populations using clinical data and polygenic risk scores.
More about the research
These projects search for such biomarkers, measurable molecular signals of disease. The main approach is proteomics, large-scale measurement of proteins, across brain tissue, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF, the fluid around the brain and spinal cord) and blood plasma. The work centers on Lewy body dementia and Alzheimer's disease, using patient samples and data from the Emory Goizueta Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (GADRC).
Why it matters
People with Lewy body dementia currently have no effective treatments and few reliable tests. Protein panels measured in blood or spinal fluid could improve early diagnosis, help monitor disease progression and show whether a therapy is working. That could open the way to drug trials. For Alzheimer's disease, standardized biomarker and genetic testing could help identify at-risk individuals and confirm disease across diverse patient populations.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jesse Cedarbaum
Yale University, CT·Medicine & Clinical Research
Profile immune cells in the blood of all 100 RBD trial participants and in the CSF of 30 of them, using single-cell RNA sequencing and in vivo perturb-seq, to see how the anti-TNF drug adalimumab changes immune cell function.
Mohammad Shahnawaz
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, TX·Neuroscience
Detect and amplify small amounts of alpha-synuclein strains from body fluids and brain tissue of patients with Parkinson's disease, multiple system atrophy and dementia with Lewy bodies, using the seeding-based PMCA (RT-QuIC) assay.
Joseph Quinn
Oregon Health & Science University, OR·Neuroscience
Collect and provide DNA, plasma, peripheral blood mononuclear cells and cerebrospinal fluid from healthy controls, people with mild cognitive impairment and people with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias.
The school
Emory University: 70 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 286 research doctorates a year.
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