Alzheimer's Association Update

Scientists have known for more than a century that an abnormal form of the protein tau accumulates in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, not until the 1980s and 1990s did scientists have tools to explore the role of tau in the nerve cell degeneration that characterizes AD. The recent emergence of tau imaging of the brains of living individuals with AD has sparked further interest in tau and likely contributed to record-breaking attendance at the fall 2015 meeting of the Alzheimer’s Association Research Roundtable (AARR) in Washington, DC. The meeting, Tau: Clinical Research to Clinical Development: A Potential Therapeutic Target and Biomarker, brought together experts from academia, industry, and regulatory agencies to examine the structure, function, and biology of tau; discuss the clinical manifestations of tau accumulation; and explore strategies to expedite development of tau-targeted therapies.