Mass General Brigham Researchers Honored at Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease Therapeutic Trials

• Lifetime Achievement Awards awarded to Dr. Reisa Sperling and Dr. Keith Johnson
• Mass General Brigham researchers will present on blood test screening results at the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease conference
• System sites are participating in national studies presented at the meeting

Mass General Brigham physicians and researchers will have a strong presence at this year’s Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease (CTAD), an annual meeting that focuses on key advancements in developing new and effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. From Nov. 29 to Dec. 2, leaders from across Mass General Brigham’s founding members, Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), will present talks and posters, chair sessions, and receive accolades. Investigators will present new data related to the AHEAD study on blood screening tests for Alzheimer’s disease and two investigators will receive CTAD’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

"This is a tremendously exciting time for our field as the evidence mounts that we are on the right track, but we still need more work to achieve our ultimate goal of preventing Alzheimer’s dementia,” said Reisa Sperling, MD, Director of the Center for Alzheimer Research and Treatment, Mass General Brigham. “We are encouraged by the lecanemab results in symptomatic Alzheimer’s patients in the Clarity AD Study and will be testing this antibody at the even earlier pre-symptomatic or ‘preclinical' stage of Alzheimer’s disease in the AHEAD 3-45 Study.”

This year, CTAD’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Alzheimer's Disease Therapeutic Research is awarded to two Mass General Brigham investigators: Reisa Sperling MD, director of the Center for Alzheimer Research and Treatment at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Keith Johnson, MD, director of Molecular Neuroimaging in the Division of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital. Both are receiving the award in recognition of their outstanding contributions to the advancement of Alzheimer’s disease clinical trials research.

Sperling’s work focuses on early detection and treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. Sperling is the co-principal investigator of the Harvard Aging Brain Study. Sperling is also the principal investigator for the NIH-funded Alzheimer’s Clinical Trial Consortium (ACTC) and the Anti-Amyloid Treatment in Asymptomatic Alzheimer’s disease (A4) Study, and recently launched two new prevention trials in the AHEAD Study A3 and A45 trials to evaluate lecanemab with the ACTC.

Johnson is the co-director of the Neuroimaging Program of the Massachusetts Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and its Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network (DIAN) research initiatives. He oversees the Clinical Brain Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Service at MGH and also practices as a neurologist that specializes in neurodegenerative disorders.

Johnson will also present a late-breaking oral communication on using Tau PET to help identify people with pre-symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease. Johnson will present new screening data from the AHEAD Study A3 and A45 trials. Immediately following, colleagues from AHEAD study will present new blood test screening results for amyloid PET prediction.

Study results from two major trials will be reported out at this year’s CTAD meeting, both of which involve Brigham investigators. The Graduate Study, a phase 3 trial of the monoclonal antibody gantenerumab, and Clarity-AD, a phase 3 trial of lecanemab for patients with mild cognitive impairment or mild Alzheimer’s disease, both had enrolled patients from sites at BWH.