ALZpath Is Powering a New Wave of Blood-Based Alzheimer’s Tests
With their renowned scientific team and seasoned CEO, ALZpath is leading the charge on a new breakthrough in Alzheimer’s detection: blood-based biomarkers designed around the p-tau217 antibody.
Challenge
If you’ve been following StartUp Health for any length of time, the global burden of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias will be familiar to you. There are around 55 million people living with dementia globally, and the numbers are skyrocketing. Some estimates project we’ll hit 140 million people by 2050, and that’s likely under-reporting due to poor diagnostic tools.
In short, the scope of the Alzheimer’s problem is massive and growing rapidly. There are new therapies, clinical trials, and lifestyle changes that can help people with Alzheimer’s – but that requires that they get an accurate and timely diagnosis. Today the gold standard for diagnosing Alzheimer’s involves complicated workups, expensive scans, and painful spinal taps. It’s the opposite of the famous “triple aim” in healthcare: it’s costly, painful, and inaccessible.
In this series we’ve shared news about a range of startups working to shift this narrative by offering low-cost, non-invasive early diagnostics for Alzheimer’s disease. One of the most exciting and noteworthy of these developments are tests that can detect Alzheimer’s from a simple blood panel. Leading the charge on the science behind these breakthrough blood tests is ALZpath, one of the newest members of StartUp Health’s Alzheimer’s Moonshot.
Origins
ALZpath was founded in 2020 by Venkat Shastri, PhD, Eric Reiman, MD, and Jerre Stead. Their vision from the beginning was to transform Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis through industry-leading scientific discoveries.
That research led them to p-tau217.
For people not working in Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (AD/RD), that will sound like scientific gibberish. But for those inside the AD/RD research community, p-tau217 is something worth shouting from the rooftops. At this year’s Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) in Philadelphia, p-tau217 was one of the most talked about breakthroughs, and ALZpath was front and center with their research.
So what is p-tau217, and what has ALZpath built? Let’s back up for a moment. In order to detect Alzheimer’s disease through a blood test we must first identify the signs (or surrogates) for brain pathology and then measure them accurately. Both of these steps have proven challenging.
One of the greatest breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s research has been the discovery that by measuring phosphorylated tau 217 (p-tau217) in the blood we can get a picture of how much amyloid beta protein has accumulated in the brain, which tells us a lot about brain pathology.
Over the last few years the ALZpath team built on the scientific community’s p-tau217 discoveries, leveraging its ability to measure brain proteins that have crossed the blood-brain barrier and entered the bloodstream. Precision measurement is essential to this work because only the tiniest molecules can bridge that blood-brain barrier.
Their work has earned the ALZpath team wide recognition in the Alzheimer’s community and has set them up for their next phase of business. In 2024, in order to transition from research and publishing to broad commercialization, ALZpath brought on seasoned CEO Chad Holland, who’d spent years developing products in rare disease and has worked on cutting-edge gene therapies related to neurodegeneration. For Holland, ALZpath represents a chance to change the course of one of the world’s most devastating diseases, which hits home both professionally and personally.
“Alzheimer's has impacted my family, my extended family, and so many others,” says Holland. “Our thesis is that earlier diagnosis saves lives, so what we are bringing to the table is a more precise and accessible diagnostic solution.”
Going to Market
Bringing ALZpath’s discoveries to market is a relatively complicated undertaking – it’s different from building a telemedicine company or digital therapeutic. The ALZpath founding team worked for years discovering the relationship between p-tau217 and Alzheimer’s disease, and yet that discovery in itself wasn’t a product they could sell. Holland thinks of it more as intellectual property that becomes extremely valuable in the hands of the right drug development partner.
“Our culture is to say that we don't have all the answers,” says Holland, “but we can be a great partner because we understand the needs of drug developers, biotech companies, and diagnostic companies. This field is going to evolve, how can we help? This method is fairly democratic,” he adds. “We want many others to be able to use our discoveries in their drug development process.”
ALZpath recently announced a partnership with Roche that cemented the company’s vision for working with the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, rather than competing as a drug platform company themselves.
For Roche and others, ALZpath will produce highly precise and accurate plasma for use in the development of Alzheimer’s disease blood tests. This approach lets ALZpath focus on the science and on building a team that can see over the horizon at the next molecule, the next discovery.
“We have an absolutely outstanding founder team,” says Holland, “and our scientific advisory board is the who's who of blood based biomarkers for neurodegenerative diseases and Alzheimer's specifically.” That board includes Henrik Zetterberg, MD, PhD, who is working directly with the FDA to set standards for blood-based Alzheimer’s tests, as well as the co-authors of the current leading JAMA paper on blood-based Alzheimer’s tests.
What’s Next
While ALZpath has entered the market working on Alzheimer’s biomarkers, their science-first approach and strong collaboration model suggest that Alzheimer’s is just the beginning.
“We're not just going to be a p-tau217 company going forward,” says Holland. “I think we're just at this early part of the convergence of neuroscience and medicine and drug development. Over the next five to ten years, we'll really start unlocking some of those puzzles, and we'll figure out there might be different types of treatments for different folks.”
With its industry-leading advisory board and recent partnerships with Roche, Beckman Coulter, and ADDF, ALZpath is poised to power a new wave of blood-based biomarkers while also forging ahead with novel research, solving all new challenges. Join us in welcoming ALZpath to StartUp Health’s Alzheimer’s Moonshot Community.
Connect with ALZpath via email
Call for Alzheimer’s Innovation
With support from the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) and Gates Ventures, we’ve launched a new global initiative created to develop a collaborative innovation community alongside leading companies, research teams, and stakeholders with a mission to accelerate progress in prevention, diagnosis, and management of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. Learn more and apply for an Alzheimer’s Moonshot Fellowship.
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Published: Sep 5, 2024