Jeffrey Dage
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, IN·Neuroscience
Diagnosing Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related brain diseases early, ideally with a simple blood test, could change how patients are identified and treated. Tau is a brain protein that forms harmful tangles in these diseases.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Pharmacology
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
dementia
tau
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Nov 2029
What they work on
- Test whether novel tau proteoforms in blood distinguish healthy volunteers from people with Alzheimer's disease or PSP, using IP/MS on samples from tau immunotherapy trials in which blood tau rose more than 20-fold.
- Compare tau proteoforms in AD and PSP brain tissue, and examine how tau antibody treatment influences which tau forms appear in blood.
- Develop connected biochemical, cellular and in vivo assays that validate emerging Alzheimer's targets beyond amyloid beta and support structure-activity relationship studies.
- Develop translational biomarker strategies that guide dose setting in early clinical testing, and share reagents and assays as Target Enabling Packages on the AD Knowledge Portal.
More about the research
Tau exists in many proteoforms, versions of the protein that differ by chemical tags or other changes. One set of projects searches blood for new tau proteoforms that could serve as biomarkers. Another builds the lab tests needed to discover drugs against new AD targets.
Why it matters
New blood biomarkers for tau could better predict cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease and enable earlier diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy, which currently has no specific biofluid test. They could also help select patients for clinical trials at earlier stages. Shared assays, reagents and biomarker strategies from the drug discovery core could lower risk for developing new classes of Alzheimer's treatments.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ling Wu
North Carolina Central University, NC·Neuroscience
Validate newly discovered phosphorylated tau (p-tau) markers for early Alzheimer's diagnosis, including distinguishing mild cognitive impairment from normal cognition, in patient plasma and cerebrospinal fluid.
Jaime Ramos-Cejudo
New York University, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether circulating markers of vascular and immune dysfunction, including platelet aggregation, neutrophil activity and blood proteomic profiles, are associated with MRI measures of cerebrovascular burden in the Framingham Heart Study and the cardiovascular-risk-enriched ARISE-DP cohort.
Puja Agarwal
Rush University, IL·Public Health & Epidemiology
Examine whether long-term diet, nutrients and flavonoids relate to activated microglia, the brain's immune cells, in the hippocampus and mid-frontal cortex of autopsied brains from community cohorts of older adults.
The school
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis: 25 labs on PI Pages, $89M a year on research, 120 research doctorates a year.
More about Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis
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