The 2025 AD/PD Conference (April 1st - 5th, Vienna) was a great meeting all around. @AmgadDroby wrote up a nice overview of highlights from the meeting.
I wanted to highlight the FNIH session in particular - there were some great updates from the biomarker consortium and some of the AMP programs related to AD, PD, and other neurodegenerative disorders.
One unique way about how the FNIH operates is that the facilitate public-private partnerships to advance breakthrough biomedical discoveries, bringing the NIH, industry partners, and patient advocacy groups together. As a self proclaimed big data nerd, another pro is the commitment to open science - the data generated by these projects are released to researchers and available for the scientific community to use. Here are some highlights, from my own bias as a self-proclaimed data nerd:
Collaborative Efforts in Biomarker Development Through the FNIH Biomarkers Consortium
Danielle Graham
Ideation Groups - these are upcoming focus areas. Exciting to see such a focus on reproducibility, reliability, validation, and improving upon existing measures.
- TDP-43: advancing TDP-43 biomarker development for TDP-43 disorders (ALS, FTD, AD, and others) by focusing on evaluating pre-analytical factors to establish foundational assays
- Neuroinflammation: validate blood and CSF measures with PET imaging to identify markers of neuroinflammation (AD and PD)
- Digital Measures: validate concurrent validity of speech-based metrics, quantify comparative advantages in ease of use, granularity, and reliability over existing measures
- Extracellular Vesicles: establish reliable and reproducible methods for isolating and analyzing extracellular vesicles (EVs) as a source of biomarkers for NDD
Single-Cell Atlas of Transcriptomic Vulnerability Across Multiple Neurodegenerative and Neuropsychiatric Diseases
Pano Roussos
Big data nerd time! Nice combination of single nuclei and variant analysis, across multiple neurodegenerative (NDD) and neuropsychiatric (NPD) diseases, identifying shared pathways
Preprint on medxriv here.
Integrative Proteomics Approach to Deconstructing Disease Complexity and Biomarker Discovery
Nicholas Seyfried
Brain and biofluid proteomics, integration, on a big data scale. AMP-AD 2.0 - looking at molecular subtyping approaches. IMHO, this is one of the major benefits of some of these large cohorts - having enough power/a large enough sample size to stratify molecular subtypes and compare them to different cognitive and pathological phenotypes.
Leveraging AMP-AD Data for Innovation in Alzheimer’s Therapeutics
Michael Nagle
Combined snRNA-Seq data with WGS data with the ROSMAP cohort, and used Sc-eQTL analysis to identify AD risk-associated variants that modulate expression of target genes in the microglia.
Accelerating Parkinson’s Disease Research with AMP-PDRD
Pablo Sardi
AMP-PD Achievements
- 8 unified cohorts, 10,844 participants with clinical data
- add in GP2 for 17,500 additional participants with clinical data, 71,835 genotyped participants data
- 100+ publications citing AMP PD, 1500+ registered users
AMP-PDRD: What’s next
- overlapping biology across PD related disorders and alpha-synucleinopathies (PD, DLB, MSA, RBD)
- related neurodegenerative movement disorders (PSP, a tauopathy)
- shared molecular targets across neurodegenerative diseases (PD, AD, ALS, FTD; ie. tauopathies, neuroinflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction)
Overall thoughts
As someone that has worked in the extracellular vesicle (EV) field for a bit, it encourages me to see a focus on standardization of isolation and analysis - this is absolutely necessary for future development of biomarkers in the EV space.
It’s great to see different phases of these projects build upon each other as new data comes out, and multi-omics approaches continue to develop. As someone that contributed to AMP-PD, it’s really encouraging for me to see data generated by earlier phases of AMP-AD and AMP-PD continue to be used and built upon. There is a large team of researchers for these FNIH projects that put in a lot of work in to follow the FAIR Principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), and seeing these data continue to be used by the community is EXCITING!
I’m also super interested to see more studies explore related disorders, whether it’s ADRD or PDRD, and the commonalities on a molecular level across them. One theme across the conference was being able to delineate across and between different neurodegenerative disorders, from a clinical, biomarker, data analysis, etc. standpoint. Better and more accurate diagnoses across all fields and levels are a goalpost for precision medicine and ongoing therapy, whether you’re focused on early diagnosis and intervention, proper stratification for clinical trials (or even existing treatments!), and ongoing therapeutic approaches.