Speakers

Dr. Suzanne Schindler is a clinical neurologist and neuroscientist focused on improving the diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer disease. She completed the MD/PhD program at Washington University, where she studied the basic biology of apolipoprotein E (apoE) metabolism in the laboratory of David Holtzman, MD. Schindler then trained in clinical neurology at Washington University and completed a fellowship in dementia under the mentorship of Drs. John Morris, Marc Diamond and Anne Fagan. Currently, Schindler sees patients with memory concerns in a weekly clinic, coordinates lumbar punctures for patients seen in the memory clinic and attends on the neurology consult service one month per year. She also performs detailed research assessments for the Knight Alzheimer Disease Research Center. She has been involved in multiple clinical trials, including the first prevention drug trial for Alzheimer disease. Schindler received a career development award from the National Institute on Aging to study cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers of Alzheimer disease. She received a large R01 to evaluate the relationship between plasma biomarkers and symptomatic Alzheimer disease. She is very interested in translating research findings into clinical practice. Further, she has a particular focus on understanding and reducing disparities in healthcare.

Dr. Charlotte Teunissen’s drive is to improve care of patients with neurological diseases by developing body fluid biomarkers for diagnosis, stratification, prognosis and monitoring treatment responses. Studies of her research group span the entire spectrum of biomarker development, starting with biomarker identification, often by –omics methods, followed by biomarker assay development and analytical validation, and lastly, extensive clinical validation and implementation of novel biomarkers in clinical practice.  

She has extensive expertise with assay development on state of the art technologies, such as mass spectrometry and antibody-based arrays for biomarker discovery, ultrasensitive immunoassays, and in implementation of vitro diagnostic technologies for clinical routine lab analysis. She is responsible for the large well-characterized biobank of the Amsterdam Dementia cohort, containing >10,000 paired CSF and serum samples of individuals visiting the memory clinic of the Alzheimer Center Amsterdam  (a.o. controls, patients with Alzheimer’s, Frontotemporal, Lewy Bodies). To ensure the quality of the biosamples, the group studies pre-analytical effects, which are key to implementation. Charlotte is leading several collaborative international biomarker networks, such as the Society for Neurochemistry and Routine CSF Analysis and the Alzheimer’s Association-Global Biomarker Standardization and Blood Based Biomarkers and the Body Fluid Biomarkers PIA, and the recently founded Coral proteomics consortium. She is the coordinator of the Marie Curie MIRIADE project, aiming to train 15 novel researchers into innovative strategies to develop dementia biomarkers (10 academic centers + 10 non-academic centers), and the JPND bPRIDE project, that aims to develop targeted blood based biomarker panels for early differential diagnoses of specific dementias and is a collaborative project between 7 European and 1 Australian centers.  

Dr. Henrik Zetterberg is a Professor of Neurochemistry at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), and University College London (UK), and a Clinical Chemist at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg (Sweden). He is Head of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurochemistry at the University of Gothenburg, leads the UK DRI Fluid Biomarker Laboratory at UCL, and is a Key Member of the Hong Kong Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases and a Visiting Professor in the University of Wisconsin Department of Medicine, School of Medicine and Public Health (Madison, WI). His main research focus and clinical interest are fluid biomarkers for brain diseases, focusing on neurodegenerative diseases in particular.