Qolamreza Ray Razlighi
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Neuroscience
Alzheimer's disease is the leading cause of dementia, and U.S. cases are expected to reach 13 million by 2050.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
dementia
tau
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2029
What they work on
- Develop the Tau Progression Index (TPI), a single prognostic score that combines each person's MRI-based structural and functional brain connectivity with the regional patterns of amyloid-beta and tau seen on PET scans.
- Test whether overlapping versus separate buildup of amyloid-beta and tau, measured by 18F-florbetaben and 18F-MK6240 PET, predicts future tau spread and decline in 130 people without dementia.
- Validate whether baseline TPI predicts tau accumulation, loss of brain tissue, and cognitive and functional decline at a 2.5-year follow-up visit with repeat PET, advanced MRI and clinical testing.
More about the research
Two proteins mark the disease in the brain: amyloid-beta, which forms sticky plaques, and tau, which forms tangles inside nerve cells. Yet two people with similar amounts of these proteins can decline at very different speeds. This makes prognosis hard for patients and families and makes clinical trials hard to design. The project asks whether the way an individual's brain is wired can predict how their disease will progress.
Why it matters
A score that predicts how fast Alzheimer's will progress in a given person could help patients and families plan for the future and support counseling. It could also help researchers choose the right participants for clinical trials and study why the disease varies so much. The TPI is a step toward more personalized care for Alzheimer's disease.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Rhoda Au
Boston University, MA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Collect digital cognitive metrics (dCog) from a digital recorder, digital pen and smartphone apps in the BU ADRC cohort, and compare people who are positive versus negative for the amyloid-tau-neurodegeneration (A/T/N) signature.
Shannon Risacher
Wake Forest University, NC·Neuroscience
Test whether changes in vision, smell and hearing in preclinical and prodromal Alzheimer's disease are driven by amyloid and tau buildup in the brain, measured by imaging, and by loss of brain tissue.
Esther Blessing
New York University, NY·Neuroscience
Verify that lower waking body temperature, measured with an ingestible telemetric thermometer, predicts tau tangles on [18F]-MK-6240 PET in 100 older adults who are cognitively normal or have mild cognitive impairment.
The school
Weill Medical College of Cornell University: 35 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 59 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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