Podcast – AAIC 2019 Day Four

Voice Over:

Welcome to the dementia researcher podcast, brought to you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk, a network for early career researchers.

Adam Smith:

Hello and welcome to the fourth and our final AAIC 2019 podcast recording from Los Angeles. I’m Adam Smith and I’m pleased to be hosting this today for the NIHR dementia researcher website. Today I’m joined by Dr. James Pickett from the Alzheimer’s society, Dr. Claire Lancaster from the University of Oxford and Dr. Emily Maguire from Cardiff University.

Adam Smith:

I should particularly say thank you to Claire who came in at very short notice a few days and even bigger thanks to Emily who didn’t realise she was doing this till an hour ago when Oz Ismail who was planning to join us, if you read that on Twitter, unfortunately hasn’t been able to attend because there’s a talk he really needs to go to.

Adam Smith:

So, thank you very much everybody for skipping the last session today to join us. Maybe we could start by just doing a little bit of a round table so you can introduce yourselves and tell us a bit about yourself and your work. So James, do you want to go first?

Dr James Pickett:

Yeah. Good day to everybody, I’m James Pickett. I’m the head of research at the Alzheimer’s Society, one of the large funders of dementia research in the UK. And so I oversee a program that they fund research, galvanises research, make sure that people with dementia are involved in research and work to really try to make sure that the work that we fund has the most impact for the people that need results to support them.

Adam Smith:

Thanks James. And you’ve been here all week as well, haven’t you?

Dr James Pickett:

I have, yes. I’ve been here since Friday. I think we’re on Thursday now, aren’t we?

Adam Smith:

I’ve seen you diligently running around in and out of every session. I’ve not once seen you asleep on a chair somewhere unlike, no, not like the other two, but unlike some people who are here. So well done.

Dr James Pickett:

Thank you. Yes, it’s a real achievement on day five.

Adam Smith:

Claire.

Dr Claire Lancaster:

Hi. So I work at the University of Oxford. I’m an experimental psychologist by background and I’m really interested in digital phenotyping and how we can use accessible tools to measure cognition more sensitively at scale in a general population.

Adam Smith:

That’s actually, that’s interesting. Did you see that there’s an anti-psychiatry museum here in town, in Hollywood?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

I did not, but that sounds like something I would like.

Adam Smith:

Because anti psychiatry, it says that psychiatry is evil and I think it’s the same people, the anti-vaxxers, are the same people who go there maybe. But yeah, check it out, might be just up your street. Nobody’s already been, you’re not, you look…

Dr Emily Maguire:

That sounds cool. Wow. Interesting.

Adam Smith:

And Emily.

Dr Emily Maguire:

Hello. So I’m Emily Maguire and I work at Cardiff University and I’m a cell biologist and I’m trying to understand how… So recently in GWA studies or genome wide association studies, it was found that a particular variant in an enzyme called PLC Gamma-2, reduces your risk of getting Alzheimer’s. So basically trying to figure out how this might work in cells.

Adam Smith:

Brilliant. Well that sounds really interesting. Thanks very much everybody again for joining us. So, actually do you know what, before we move on, I might just come back to you Emily because I just want to talk a little bit about your own presentations. So, you’re delivering a talk tomorrow, not yet? Firstly the conference is a five day conference but it’s only a half day on the last day, isn’t it? So what are you presenting on tomorrow?

Dr Emily Maguire:

So, tomorrow I’m presenting on not only my work but the work for me and several other labs in the UK DRI. So, it’s a collaboration to try and understand the role of this variant in the pathology of Alzheimer’s. So, I’ve developed some using [inaudible 00:04:03], STEM cell models of this PLC Gamma-2 variant. And we’ve also developed some mouse models of this protective PLC Gamma-2 variant.

Dr Emily Maguire:

And we’ve done some computational modelling and the aim of all of this work… Well, what we did is we demonstrated that this enzyme has enhanced function and enzyme activity within the variant. And hopefully the aim is to do some drug screening to see if we can mimic this increased enzymatic activity in cells, with the aim that maybe this would be helpful in AD in the future. So, that’s basically what I’m going to be presenting tomorrow and hopefully people are still around and they haven’t all left early.

Adam Smith:

No, that sounds really, really interesting. And so that’s at the DRI the Dementia Research Institute.

Dr Emily Maguire:

Yeah. So that’s the UK DRI, in Cardiff.

Adam Smith:

For those that aren’t in the UK. Well good luck with the talk and Claire you’ve been presenting as well?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

Yeah, so I started off the week presenting at the tech conference at the start. So the pre-conference and I was talking about the game changer citizen science study, we’ve been running with Alzheimer’s Society, which launched last September. And the aim is to get people all around the UK completing five minutes a day for a month, smartphone based tasks that we’ve developed.

Dr Claire Lancaster:

And then I also presented, today I’m talking about a naturalistic speech processing task and also our executive function task. Again, both administered by smartphone and some of our early validation evidence in comparison to in-clinic tests.

Adam Smith:

Fantastic. And now how has that been received? Have you had lots of interest?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

Yeah, so everybody seems really enthusiastic about game changer. I think the nice thing is not just how many people we’ve involved, but how many people have stuck with it for the whole 30 days. And people seem quite receptive to the more novel approach we’ve taken to behavioural assessment via the smartphone. So not just translating the pen and paper tests, but developing our own,

Adam Smith:

What is the retention rate? I mean how many people do reliably come back and do this?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

So, we analysed it for the first 10,000 people and I think average compliance was about 70 something percent, which was comparable to what we got from the prevent cohort that we piloted in. And the majority of people are still active by day 30 and so that was by far the most common exit date from the study.

Adam Smith:

70%, that’s cool. And do you take, because the learning from game apps where they make themselves, what’s the word? Not sticky, it used to be sticky, didn’t it? Websites become sticky. What do apps become? Is there an equivalent of sticky? Like addictive, I don’t know. You’ve all got those apps. I mean how do you make this like Twitter where you feel the need to check it every three times a day?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

So, like the candy crush. So I guess we have a few features of gameification in there. So simple things like giving people gold stars when they do something well seems to really work. But returning to what James was saying, we also did a lot of patient and public involvement around the design of the tasks that we’ve produced. So thinking about what makes people enjoy it and what makes it easy, like cutting down on the wordy instructions and just letting people get to it seems to work.

Adam Smith:

They figure it out. It’s always annoying when you do so many things and then you have a little countdown timer saying you’ve got to wait five hours before you can do this again. And then check whether your five hours is up. It’s just me.

Adam Smith:

Saying that though, I’m sat here and as I’ve been walking here today, I was doing Harry Potter Wizards Unite, which is the app version of the new Pokemon equivalent.

Dr James Pickett:

Well got on game changer.

Adam Smith:

I’ve collected loads of stuff this week, while I’ve been here. Thanks very much Claire. All right, so let’s have a think about beyond your own presentations, what have we seen today that’s been particularly interesting James? Is there anything you want to pick out first?

Dr James Pickett:

Yeah, it’s been a really interesting day. I mean it started off, I went to a session called Clinical Trials Other and it’s only one of about three clinical trials sessions in the whole conference I think, which again tells us where they think this field is at. We’ve seen so much basic research and we’re waiting for that to really bring us trials. And I think the name of the study is interesting, other, meaning, I guess that means not amyloid, but within it there were a couple of really interesting presentations and the first one was looking at a particular new drug.

Dr James Pickett:

It was an HVAC inhibitor for those that are interested in testing this in a genetic population who are highly susceptible to developing FTD. And they presented the results and unfortunately the trial was negative, it didn’t work. This drug will not help people with FTD, but we always hear when people present negatives like, we learn from the failures kind of thing.

Dr James Pickett:

And so, they went on and they presented one of their biomarker data from this study, the FDG pet that they were actually able to validate as a biomarker in that cohort. So, it really brought to life, that kind of thing. We do learn when drugs don’t work and they are really important human experimental studies that really gain from, so that was kind of the first thing.

Dr James Pickett:

And then the second thing I think was a piece of good news and it was a presentation from Merck on one of their drugs that they have licensed at the moment for insomnia. It’s an Orexin antagonist again, for those that want to look at this. And they ran a 300 person trial in early AD to actually see if it could help people that had sleep difficulties. And so we know, at the Alzheimer’s society, is a common and a real problem for both the person with dementia, but also families that live close by.

Dr James Pickett:

If people aren’t sleeping, it often leads to crisis and that’s what takes people into care homes. So, well the good news is that this does actually seem to be a drug that can help people who struggle with sleep problems both in the longer duration of sleep and with quality of sleep. And so it wasn’t the first time it’s been presented, the results came out in May, but that’s now going under FDA regulation for use in Alzheimer’s sleep.

Dr James Pickett:

So clinicians who I know really struggle with this and we’ve done some funding with UCL on this kind of work, will hopefully have some new options for sleep in the not too distant future.

Adam Smith:

Oh, that’s interesting because I know that particular trial because I did some work to support recruitment to it and they were finding it really hard to recruit to that trial. I think the criteria for testing it was quite tricky. So it’s great that some things come through that. The first one you mentioned there, was that commercial or was that non-commercial, the drug trial?

Dr James Pickett:

It was a commercial study.

Adam Smith:

Okay, fantastic.

Dr Emily Maguire:

Yeah, it’s really good that the Alzheimer’s association, are giving people talks to show null results because it’s been such a problem in the scientific community with people doing experiments that have already been done, but nobody knows that they’ve already been done. It’s just such a massive waste of funding and resources.

Adam Smith:

I think one of the problems is actually persuading those companies to come forward and present. Not that there aren’t opportunities, it’s sharing that data, in fact, that’s actually something we’ve been looking at in our offices about how we can encourage more data sharing, particularly not just negative results but also disregarded data, particularly from animal model testing where this data just didn’t prove what you wanted to, it just gets set to one side. If that was put into a repository and shared that could be very helpful.

Dr Emily Maguire:

That’s true. I think with other fields like I think in psychology they have like journals have no results where people publish these studies and maybe we need to be [crosstalk 00:12:13].

Dr James Pickett:

Also, bio-archive and other prepay reviewed archives that are, we’re certainly supportive of at the Alzheimer’s society that mean that people can at least share information and it comes with a caveat. It hasn’t been peer reviewed, but yeah, we need to disseminate faster. So agree completely.

Adam Smith:

Brilliant, thanks James. What about you Claire? Did you see anything particular today?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

So, I spent the afternoon at the Lifestyle Intervention session, which was quite interesting. So, I say like the main take home I took from that is that we need to be more targeted so we can’t just say exercise is going to benefit everyone, although it probably will, but say if you have a higher risk of say, and a speaker I saw was somebody called Brown and she was saying that if you have an [inaudible 00:13:09] and you do more exercise, the effects are more beneficial.

Dr Claire Lancaster:

And then it was also a talk on precision medicine and how we can kind of target interventions for those at greater risk and what that risk factor is. And so I thought that was really important.

Adam Smith:

Precision medicine, that’s three days running precision medicine’s be mentioned, actually four days, I think every day precision medicine has been mentioned here. It’s on the podcast between targeted treatments but also as well if you can target prevention as well. That seems to make sense, I think on exercise levels.

Adam Smith:

I saw a poster earlier that was trying to not necessarily get people to exercise who otherwise wouldn’t do, but at least maintain the exercise that they had as their condition started to deteriorate so that they potentially had the benefits that come through a healthier lifestyle. Whether that’s proved cognitively, but you know, I suppose having a healthy lifestyle might at least mean you’ve got a healthier body, which means you can fend off some of those other comorbidities that we know affect people while they’re living with dementia.

Adam Smith:

Brilliant. Sorry James, you looked like you were going to ask a question of?

Dr James Pickett:

My poker face, that’s my poker face. I mean, I think the word precision medicine is really interesting. We’re beginning to learn that Alzheimer’s disease is probably a heterogeneous, got that word wrong, didn’t I? But lots of different diseases that actually underlie it and maybe we were calling that precision medicine, but it’s just actually understanding the different mechanisms of underlying biology a bit more. And so it’s, of course, going to be very popular and topical.

Adam Smith:

I suppose before I come to you Emily, it’s quite hard to pick on something particularly because we’ve got the benefit now of we’ve been here for several days so I’m kind of, you haven’t had an opportunity to pick out anything from the last few days as well that may have interested you, so you don’t have to just pick on something today, Emily, if there’s something you’ve seen earlier on in the week that you thought was interesting from your field.

Dr Emily Maguire:

Well, thinking about it because we just talked about precision medicine and that reminded me of the plenary earlier where Bart De Strooper because he’s head of the UK DRI and obviously so that’s where I work. So I’m a fan of his and he’s talking about the role of microglia and also he was talking a lot about the role of risk genes that have been decided via GWAS and how they might be having an effect on the phenotype and because we’ll be able to build a profile of what risk genes people have. Now in the future if we’re looking at how these risk genes influence the microglia and the phenotype, then precision medicine to target specific risk genes that people have, would probably be useful rather than just generally targeting amyloid beta. Well if we know that they might be at risk of developing dementia due to changes in a specific process or pathway, then this is probably, yeah. Basically I thought [crosstalk 00:16:18].

Adam Smith:

Well, actually that that moves us on quite nicely to Bart’s talk because of course I think Bart was the headline speaker today, was he? Would you count that? No. Or are we being unfair to David Walk that presented from Pennsylvania, that presented before him. Actually let’s talk about Bart’s talk since we were on that. James, what did you make of Bart’s presentation? What was it? It was called cellular phases of AD.

Dr James Pickett:

It was, yes, and this is I think really based on a seminar paper, that Bart, seminar review in cell that Bart wrote a few years ago that really suggests that we studied the biochemical phase of Alzheimer’s disease in a lot of detail and not the downstream cellular and physiological consequences of that and really trying to fill in that group and indeed the UK DRI is really built on trying to fill that void of knowledge.

Dr James Pickett:

I mean Bart gave a superb talk, I think some of the early slides that he presented that showed where we were compared to cancer and HIV just in the volume of papers that are being produced annually that we’re about 5% of the papers compared to cancer each year. Just shows that where we are in the field and where we’ve got to go.

Adam Smith:

Right. Did you manage to see that one as well, Claire?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

I did. I thought it was a really, really great talk. I guess the things that I thought were really interesting as well as the discussion of where Alzheimer’s research sits in relation to cancer. What’s the kind of discussion about how we look at amyloid, which starts 30 years before clinical symptoms and then we try and compare it to these characterisations of dementia later in life. And we really need to be thinking about developing functional assays earlier in the lifespan.

Adam Smith:

Yeah, I mean, I’ve wrote a few, I mean I think it’s fair to say it was a little bit, he threw a few things out there that people might not necessarily have liked to hear or a few controversial bits.

Dr James Pickett:

But I think that’s what we need to do. I mean we really need to test our hypothesis that we have in the field. And towards the end Bart was starting to just ask in a very calm way where’s the genetic evidence that tau is important in AD? And his suggestion to the audience was that the evidence was not really there. And so I think that’s quite provocative and we need to test ourselves with those theories.

Adam Smith:

Absolutely. Specifically said, didn’t he, the genetic evidence of tau is very weak unlike amyloid and tau pathology is likely neuro degeneration response and removing it might not make a difference.

Dr James Pickett:

Time will tell.

Adam Smith:

He also said that he thought that we weren’t learning enough from the failed drug trials, which he said that there was more that could be learned from that as well. And what I’ve written in my notes here that we shouldn’t be targeting all the enzymes at once, which is what they’ve tried to do up to now. Does that sound reasonable?

Dr Emily Maguire:

Yeah, yeah. I mean I was thinking about with regards to exploring other pathways. I mean we all know that in fields scientists you can become very invested in an idea or a theory and tau and amyloid are obviously, they’re obviously important in Alzheimer’s, but if we continue to focus primarily on them, then we’re missing so many opportunities to explore the complexity of the disease and I think it’s really important to look at these other areas. I mean I think it can really hold a field back if you, based on previous observations, become very invested in a theory and then don’t [crosstalk 00:19:59].

Adam Smith:

I wrote down the final, I mean this is verbatim and from his final slides, which was FED mutants point unequivocally to amyloid beta GWA studies point very much at microglia. Genetic risk of AD is largely determined by microglia’s response to amyloid beta. This is all some, right? Where is tau in that? There was a question mark after that and then the importance, he also pointed out the importance of multicellular models and that mice brains aren’t the same as human brains and that we needed to increase use of IPS cells.

Dr James Pickett:

Yeah. Like I don’t want to speak too much more to this because I’m not particularly informed, but I think it’s important that in taking this away that Bart was talking about the role of tau in AD and we know that there are other tauopathies, there is an amyloid and so, I don’t think his statements were applying to all forms of dementia, but, and I don’t think it’s exactly what he necessarily thinks, but I think he’s just putting it there as a hypothesis that we need to be challenging ourselves about what we think we understand about the disease.

Adam Smith:

And I thought that point he made at the start that we shouldn’t be surprised that there hasn’t been progress in drug treatments. Because when you compare to the number of cancer trials, like you were saying before, Claire, the number of the failure rate on cancer trials is actually proportional to the failure on AD trials. It’s just that there are a lot less AD trials.

Adam Smith:

So, you feel every failure slightly more than you do in cancer where there are so many more things going on. But yeah, interesting talk by Bart. I think everybody came away with something to think about from that one, which was interesting. Before that we did have David Walk, who was talking about neuro imaging and neuro generation, what’s new. Is there anything new?

Dr Emily Maguire:

I guess in a similar, so because I don’t do MRI stuff, some of that was over my head a little bit, but what I thought was interesting is that, so in Bart’s talk he was talking about how we should be looking at these earlier stages in part and also with the previous one, with the MRI data and they have patients before the onset of clinical symptoms of AD and I think that they found changes in a specific brain region that wasn’t present during the other stages. So maybe I thought that that was really useful because if we’re talking about going earlier than in the future, that could be really good for that.

Adam Smith:

Absolutely. Did anybody else catch that talk?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

Yeah. Again, I thought it was really good. I think this is what you were saying, but I felt like the more nuanced breakdown of like the medial temporal lobe regions was really interesting and trying to separate the earlier stages of disease, but also the disease signature from the aging signature, I thought that was really interesting.

Adam Smith:

I wrote down in notes that he was saying that particularly that we’re seeing more post-mortem MRI imaging needed to be done and combining the link with histology and that more clever use of that was making a difference and using, just modernizing, creating 3-D printing, 3-D printing moulds to whole brain, so you can FMRI those, which is clever use of 3-D printers.

Dr Claire Lancaster:

Yeah, 3-D printing is everywhere now, isn’t it?

Adam Smith:

Do you do 3-D printing in your work?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

I don’t, but…

Adam Smith:

Have you thought of a way you could?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

No, I just, I think it’s, I mean it’s off topic, but you know how they use it in operations nowadays, to practice on the operations beforehand, basically I just think it’s entering in loads of areas of science and 3-D printing, it’s so cheap as well.

Dr James Pickett:

To broaden this, I think bringing the engineering sciences into dementia research is something that both Bart suggested we needed to do and we others believe in. Not to talk about the DRI too much, but bringing on a new centre most recently we’re focused on care and technology that the attraction of that is bringing engineering into the field and we’re seeing it in the UK DRI but also in other spaces and that again, the diversity of expertise, we bring into research is only going to help us broaden the number of targets and focus that we have.

Adam Smith:

And the chap whose name suddenly skipped, he made that point yesterday when he highlighted all the different roles of people in his team. There was an engineering as well as the statistician as well as the biologists and these are the people that bring in together these multi-skilled teams.

Dr Emily Maguire:

Professor Liddelow.

Adam Smith:

That’s right.

Dr James Pickett:

Yeah. I mean we’ve seen some great, every plenary talk we’ve seen I think has been really great in terms of the scientific content. But when you present to such a big audience, it’s 6,000, you’ve got all these different disciplines, I guess you really have to think about how you tailor what you’re going to present so that you can bring everyone with you through the whole part.

Dr James Pickett:

And I think certainly when you get on the stage like that, people that bring in some personal anecdotes, talk about the troubles as well as the beautiful successes that they’ve had and that really spend appropriate time talking to the big team, the humongous team that’s often got them up onto the plenary stage at AIC, it’s really great to see.

Adam Smith:

Absolutely. So his final point was that MRI is still important with improvement in methodology. He was making a case for keeping MRIs right as everybody moves on.

Dr James Pickett:

Well, newer images generally work.

Adam Smith:

Absolutely, but I think you make a really good point, and we’ve talked about this week as well about the importance of different disease areas coming in. I think one of the fantastic things about this conference is that if you really wanted to stick to what you feel comfortable with, your home, what’s it when they have a Question of Sport, when you can have your home topic or an away, home or away.

Adam Smith:

If you wanted to come to this conference and do home or away, you really could. You could just go to things all week, which is in your comfort zone or you could go and see some of the things and I think from the people I’ve spoken to, they’ve definitely spread out and thought, do you know what? Actually this next session, there’s nothing going on that is in my comfort zone. I’ll go to see this and hopefully create those connections.

Dr Emily Maguire:

I think it’s so important. I think that people, when you go to things outside of your comfort zone, you can learn a lot from that about methodology or how you should be looking with a different perspective at what you do. So if you just go to things in your comfort zone, then you’re missing out on a lot of development.

Adam Smith:

Even if all you do is take half an hour out of the day to walk to get your steps in and walk up and down the 55 rows of posters, the 500 poster boards, which they are, fair enough, they’re not awful, but 500 poster boards. You can’t help but walk up and down there and find something that catches your eye or something interesting that’s a little bit different. Even if the people aren’t there to talk to.

Adam Smith:

My phone is now full of pictures of posters that I’ve got to read later on, which I’ll find time to do. Okay, so this of course is diff for, it’s the last of our podcast today. So before we start to think about wrapping things up, I just wanted to get, just generally get your reflections on the end of the conference. We’re not doing another podcast and I know some of you haven’t even presented yet, and I’m sure you’re all going to be diligently here tomorrow, not going off to the beach. Yeah. Phew.

Dr James Pickett:

Looking at in the mirror…

Adam Smith:

Stunned silences. I’ll be here.

Dr James Pickett:

He’ll be down muscle beach, I’m sure.

Adam Smith:

I’ll be here tomorrow.

Dr James Pickett:

Adam can bench press.

Adam Smith:

So, what are your reflections on the confidence? How do you feel it’s gone, James?

Dr James Pickett:

I mean overall it’s been really interesting. I’ve enjoyed, there’s been a couple of sessions that have brought the aging and dementia together. I know you spoke about one on Monday that talked about DNA damage and I really thought that was on the nail and really important. I mean a second thing that’s really come out for me is there’s been a lot more about inclusion and diversity. They call it disparities quite a lot more over here in the US.

Dr James Pickett:

And just this afternoon I co-hosted with the Alzheimer’s association, a bringing together of all the global funders of dementia research to actually, we speak quite regularly actually to understand what each other are doing and try to coordinate efforts. And we actually had an hour long session that again talked about as funders, what can we do to fund more inclusive and diverse research as well. And it’s been really great through the conference to see that being an issue that everyone, it’s different in every culture, in every country, what exactly that means. But that’s been something that has been more apparent in this meeting than I’d seen in previous ones.

Adam Smith:

Yeah. I think I said to you, in fact actually you know what you’ve just reminded me of something that I meant to mention before, that the very last session that I went to before I came here was about [APOE2 00:28:56] and it’s potential to be a, what’s the word I’m looking for? I’m looking to… Protective, that’s right and to be a protective element. And you were talking about risk ones and he was making a case to say that there’s not enough going on to potentially map out and look at the protective genes, not just the risk ones. Are you’re looking at APOE2 as well?

Dr Emily Maguire:

We have APOE2 cells and APOE3 and APOE4 and one thing that I’m planning on doing is using, because you can use the condition medium from these APOE2, 3 and 4 cells and put them on the risk genes and see if there’s any improvement. So, that’s also something that we’re doing.

Adam Smith:

I’ll put a link in, I can’t remember exactly the name of the speaker. I was trying to find it on my phone while James was talking. I’ll put it in and put a link in.

Dr James Pickett:

Just on the inclusion point. So a lot of the genetics studies, you’re doing are largely based on white Caucasians studies and we know what we know about the risk genes in white Caucasians and the protective genes. But if we go to other populations, we don’t actually know if the same genetic risk.

Dr Emily Maguire:

No, totally. Did you see the talk yesterday in the genetic session? Actually it was the day before.

Dr James Pickett:

Of course, but reminds me.

Dr Emily Maguire:

And so they did a big study, well actually it wasn’t as big as with like white Caucasians because they simply didn’t have enough people involved. But the risk genes were very different and there was very little overlap between African American risk genes and white Caucasian risk genes.

Dr Emily Maguire:

But I think there was some overlap in the pathways that they were involved in. So in this way presumably it’s the same pathways effected so we can still get quite a lot from looking at the risk genes on both sides. We have definitely more needs to be done.

Dr James Pickett:

More research needed.

Dr Emily Maguire:

In fact, in order to confirm a GWA study, usually you confirm it in several different datasets but because I think they could only scrape together enough for one data set, they haven’t been able to confirm it yet. So definitely we need to get more people involved in that.

Adam Smith:

I had a question about, I’m going to ask it off, I’m not going to appear too stupid. I’m going to ask it once recordings stopped. Need to make a note to remember that. Claire, anything, any reflections on the?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

I guess I’d definitely recommend it as a conference. I think because it’s quite long, you really get a chance to immerse yourself in Alzheimer’s research for however many days it’s been. And there’s also quite a lot of good social events. Like I think we’re off to the early careers researchers event tonight. So it’s like a really good opportunity to get to know people in your field

Adam Smith:

Yeah, to network and to meet people as well. Brilliant.

Dr Claire Lancaster:

Yeah, I mean on the networking, though, they’ve definitely done that well. When they had an event the other night, everybody’s really, really friendly and willing to chat and there’s such a wide variety of people there. So I talked to a lot of people who are researchers, a lot of clinicians from pharmaceutical companies and also some people who work in dementia care. That’s really good to…

Adam Smith:

Was this your first AAIC?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

Yes.

Adam Smith:

It was. And I would imagine it’s right up your street, right? Because I mean the work you’re doing has been talked about lots.

Dr Claire Lancaster:

Yeah, yeah. I’m happy that microglia are so popular at the moment because I like microglia.

Adam Smith:

Well and if you haven’t already listened, we did record and publish a podcast a few weeks ago called, which they named they it themselves, I should add, that it was called 50 shades on Microglia, the team from Edinburgh, they picked their own name. We didn’t do it. That’s available in our podcast feed on iTunes and SoundCloud and Spotify. You can find that there.

Adam Smith:

Okay. I’m going to wrap things up there, although before I do, can I just ask, did anybody go to the talk about Stress Granules? No? Everybody’s looking at me with blank faces. Nobody did.

Dr James Pickett:

But remind me.

Adam Smith:

No, we didn’t. I promise, we’ve talked about stress granules every day. It was Maria Carrillo mentioned it, right at the start. She thought it was important and then we haven’t had, none of our 12 panellists actually managed to make it to that talk, but we’ve talked about it a lot. So I feel like we should go out. I’m going to find somebody to write a POG, a POG? It’s a bit like a blog. I’m going to find somebody to write a blog on stress granules and make sure that’s with you sometime next week.

Adam Smith:

Okay. Thank you very much everybody. The conference does continue tomorrow, but we won’t be recording today. Listeners can contact our panellists on Twitter except for Emily who’s not on Twitter. That’s all right.

Adam Smith:

Claire and James, can people get hold of you on Twitter if they have questions?

Dr James Pickett:

Of course.

Adam Smith:

Your Twitter names. Let’s get those out there.

Dr James Pickett:

Jamespickett12.

Dr Claire Lancaster:

CLL_Lancaster.

Adam Smith:

Fantastic. Thank you very much and do you all head home immediately after the conference? Are you going back today James? Tomorrow? Not tomorrow. Yeah. Brilliant.

Adam Smith:

Well, thank you very much everybody for joining us today. Please remember to subscribe and leave a review of our podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Spotify and tell your friends and colleagues. It’s been great to bring these podcasts to you from the AAIC. I particularly want to thank all of the 12 panellists who’ve joined us over the last four days. You can find profiles on all of our panellists on our website with details of how to contact them as well, if you have any questions about their own work or their presentations. And if you want to see more reflections on the conference and catch up on particular talks, you can find those on Twitter using search on the hashtag AAIC19.

Adam Smith:

Thank you very much and we’ll be back with our usual recordings a week on Monday, in about 10 days’ time. Thank you.

Voice Over:

This was a podcast brought to you by Dementia Researcher. Everything you need in one place. Register today at dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk.

END