This week, I was honored to participate in a meeting convened by colleagues at the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute, organizers of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Initiative. The 1.5 day meeting in Pentagon City brought together a large variety of stakeholders, including researchers, advocates, pharmaceutical company scientists, non-profit organizations, and persons living with disease. It also included former US and current European regulatory officials (current US regulatory officials were not permitted to participate due to current federal communication pauses).
The meeting was invigorating. Open dialogue ruled the day(s) and the optimism about progress toward discovering disease-delaying therapies was met with clear-eyed recognition of the great unmet need and challenges that lay before us if we are to enter an age where at least some people have their dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease delayed or even prevented. Colleagues at the University of Wisconsin and I recently outlined some of those needs, but this meeting went deeper and further.
My own role in this meeting—which included presentations on treatments, trials, regulations, biomarkers, and accessibility—was to serve on a panel that addressed the personal, social, and medicolegal aspects of delivering a diagnosis of a stigmatized and feared condition years before the symptoms synonymous with its label become realized.
For all of these areas, the needed work that remains is immense and critical, even if—or perhaps especially if—the current exciting clinical trials of lecanemab and donanemab in populations without but at risk for cognitive impairment demonstrate efficacy. But perhaps the most consistent theme of this and other meetings I’ve attended recently was this: the field is steadfast and replete with talented and devoted investigators who will not stop until the job is done.
