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Special Lecture 1

Development of Plasma Biomarkers and Disease-modifying Drugs for Alzheimer
Disease

Prof. MasatoshiTakeda

Rector, Aino University

After suspension of the initial clinical trial of amyloid vaccine (AN 1792) was suspended in
2002 due to unexpected asceptic meningoencephalitis, many clinical trials of gamma-secretase
inhibitors, gamma-secretase modulators, beta-secretase inhibitors, or immunotherapy (active or
passive) against amyloid have failed to produce enough clinical efficacy. Reflecting the difficulty in
development of disease-modifying drugs, the strategy of early intervention has been introduced such
as Alzheimer Prevention Initiatives (API), A4 Study, or DIAN Study, which are designed to evaluate
the effectiveness, safety and tolerability of an investigational drug for Alzheimer’ disease to the older
individuals who have normal thinking and memory function but who may be at risk for developing
Alzheimer's disease (AD) memory loss sometime in the future.
In this context, the development of reliable biomarkers is the most important, such as CSF amyloid,
CSF tau, cerebral amyloid and/ or tau deposition by PET.
APLP1 and APLP2 are surrogate biomarkers of Alzheimer disease developed in my laboratory, and
the recent data of plasma APLPA and APLP2 data will be presented for discussion.