Ling Wu
North Carolina Central University, NC·Neuroscience
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is hard to diagnose early, and it can be confused with other dementias that also involve tangles of the protein tau (tauopathies). Doctors need cheap, minimally invasive blood or spinal fluid tests that are both sensitive and specific.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biochemistry
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
dementia
tau
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Nov 2026
What they work on
- Validate newly discovered phosphorylated tau (p-tau) markers for early Alzheimer's diagnosis, including distinguishing mild cognitive impairment from normal cognition, in patient plasma and cerebrospinal fluid.
- Develop new p-tau biomarkers that distinguish Alzheimer's disease from other tauopathies, extending findings from postmortem brain tissue to premortem patient biofluids.
- Build ultrasensitive Simoa (single molecule array) tests to detect and quantify the new p-tau markers in blood and spinal fluid, and compare them with p-tau181 and p-tau217.
More about the research
Such tests would allow earlier diagnosis, tracking of disease severity, prediction of disease course, and checks on whether drugs work.
Why it matters
Older adults with memory problems and their doctors could benefit from low-cost blood or spinal fluid tests that catch Alzheimer's at the mild cognitive impairment stage and distinguish it from other tau-related dementias. More accurate tests could guide diagnosis, track disease progression, and help judge whether treatments are working.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jeffrey Dage
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, IN·Neuroscience
Test whether novel tau proteoforms in blood distinguish healthy volunteers from people with Alzheimer's disease or PSP, using IP/MS on samples from tau immunotherapy trials in which blood tau rose more than 20-fold.
Joseph Quinn
Oregon Health & Science University, OR·Neuroscience
Collect and provide DNA, plasma, peripheral blood mononuclear cells and cerebrospinal fluid from healthy controls, people with mild cognitive impairment and people with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias.
Barbara Snider
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether 6 months of suvorexant, a sleep drug that blocks wake-promoting orexin signals, lowers the ratio of phosphorylated to unmodified tau-181 in spinal fluid of cognitively normal, amyloid-positive older adults with insomnia, compared with placebo.
The school
North Carolina Central University: 4 labs on PI Pages, $16M a year on research, 2 research doctorates a year.
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