Annual Publication 2025 FINAL 05292025 accessible - Flipbook - Page 24
ON THE FOREFRONT
OF ALZHEIMER’S
DISEASE RESEARCH
BY LAURIE GARCIA
The panel – with Mark Guadagnoli, PhD,
senior associate dean for faculty affairs
and director of learning and performance,
as the emcee – consisted of Marc J.
Kahn, MD, MBA, former dean of the
Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine and
current chief of hematology; Jefferson W.
Kinney, PhD, founding chair and the Reg
Grundy and Joy Chambers-Grundy Chair
for Brain Health and co-director of the
Pam Quirk Brain Health and Biomarker
Laboratory; Kate Zhong, MD, MSc, director
of innovation; Jeffrey L. Cummings, MD,
ScD(HC), director of the Chambers-Grundy
Center for Transformative Neuroscience
and co-director of the Pam Quirk Brain
Health and Biomarker Laboratory.
“... I truly believe that neuroscience that
succeeds, transforms lives. It’s therapeutic,
it intervenes in the diseases that everyone
knows someone who has. Transformative
neuroscience and our center are devoted
to the development of therapeutics, and
we have some unique approaches to
doing that,” says Dr. Cummings, regarding
the name of the Chambers-Grundy Center
for Transformative Neuroscience (CGCTN).
Within the CGC-TN, there are 昀椀ve main
areas: the clinical trial observatory, the
biomarker observatory, the biomarker
laboratory, the innovation incubator, and
the learning & teaching collaboratory. It’s
within these areas that the brain health
team is working on research that aids in
the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment
of Alzheimer’s disease.
The clinical trial observatory is a database
that extracts its information from the
federal registry for clinical trials. “We
follow the universe of drugs that are
moving through the pipeline and some
of them are going to become successful
therapies for Alzheimer’s disease,” states
Dr. Cummings.
The observatory produces a publication
annually that provides updates on the
Alzheimer’s disease drug development
pipeline, allowing this data to easily be
interpreted and used to inform drug
development programs.
A signi昀椀cant development in Alzheimer’s
disease involves the use of biomarkers to
track the disease before the 昀椀rst symptoms
begin to appear. These biomarkers are
studied within the CGC-TN’s biomarker
observatory and the biomarker laboratory.
“... with the development of the biomarker,
we started to see the protein in the brain …
we’re moving from not only treatment, but
detection and now we are really looking at
prevention,” says Dr. Zhong.
Dr. Cummings adds, “... we can detect
the people that have it in the brain before
they have any symptoms, and we can do
it with a blood test. That sets the stage
for our being able to prevent it by the
early administration of therapeutics.
24 KIRK KERKORIAN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT UNLV
PHOTO: JULIAN FOX
O
n February 7, 2025, the
Kirk Kerkorian School
of Medicine at UNLV
celebrated the arrival of
the department of brain
health with the “Brain
Health Frontiers: Tackling Alzheimer’s
Together” panel discussion. Attendees
were not only treated to an introduction
to the department of brain health and
its team, but were also given a glimpse
into the groundbreaking research they
are doing when it comes to Alzheimer’s
disease.
We’re looking at a whole different way of
thinking about brain disorders because
we can see them before they have caused
the damage to the person’s ability to
function.”
“... there’s one biomarker that is currently
being considered by [the] FDA [Food and
Drug Administration] as a screening tool,
and, in fact, some of the data for that
FDA application came from the Pam
Quirk lab. We were one of three sites that
contributed data for this,” says Dr. Kinney.
“We have a couple of biomarkers that
we think are better, and we’re developing
these ourselves, that as far as I know, no
one else is working on.”
