Paul Stephen Aisen is an American physician and medical researcher. He started his career as a rheumatologist and then made Alzheimer's disease his focus.
As of 2015 he was on the faculty of the Keck School of Medicine of USC and his offices were in San Diego. [1]
Aisen did his undergraduate work in biochemistry and molecular biology at Harvard and obtained his medical degree from Columbia University. He did his residency at Case Western Reserve University and at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, and trained further through a fellowship in rheumatology at New York University. He has a private practice as a GP and rheumatologist in New York, then joined the faculty of Mount Sinai in 1994. He was recruited to the Georgetown University School of Medicine in 1999 in neurology and medicine and began focusing his practice and research on Alzheimer's disease there. [2]
In 2007 Aisen was recruited to University of California San Diego to run the Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study, which UCSD had established in 1991 and coordinates studies on Alzheimer's disease drugs like solanezumab. [3] He left UCSD in 2015 because he was unhappy with the level of support that UCSD was providing him and due to USC's offer. [4] UCSD and USC ended up in litigation over control of the ca. $100 million program and its research data, which involved six ongoing clinical trials and data collected on thousands of clinical trial subjects. [5] [6] Part of the dispute arose because Aisen's lab had uploaded the data from the ADCS onto Amazon Cloud servers and would not give the passwords to UCSD officials. [3] USC rented space for Aisen in a San Diego office park, where Keck's Alzheimer's Therapeutic Research Institute is located under Aisen's direction. [1] [7] Some aspects of data management were temporarily settled in 2016; [8] and a settlement was reached in 2019, with USC to pay UCD $50 million compensation and make a public statement that is actions "did not align with the standards of ethics and integrity which USC expects of all its faculty, administrators, and staff." [9]
Aisen has been a strong proponent of the amyloid hypothesis and as of 2017 believed that earlier intervention with drugs against amyloid might show more efficacy than interventions when the disease process is well underway, and has helped initiate large trials to test ways to prevent Alzheimer's disease. [10] [11]
He has served as a consultant or advisor for pharmaceutical companies Eli Lilly [3] [12] and Janssen, [13] smaller biotech companies exploring alternative approaches to AD like Anavex Life Sciences, [14] Proclara, [15] CohBar, [16] and Neurophage, [17] as well as nonprofits like ACT-AD. [18] He is a principal investigator in the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. [19]
In November 2018 Expertscape recognized Aisen as one of the world's top-ranked experts in Alzheimer's disease. [20] He has an h-index of 107 according to Semantic Scholar. [21]
Scripps Research is a nonprofit American medical research facility that focuses on research and education in the biomedical sciences. Headquartered in San Diego, California, the institute has over 170 laboratories employing 2,100 scientists, technicians, graduate students, and administrative and other staff.
The Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California teaches and trains physicians, biomedical scientists and other healthcare professionals, conducts medical research, and treats patients. Founded in 1885, it is the second oldest medical school in California after the UCSF School of Medicine.
Lawrence S.B. Goldstein is a professor of cellular and molecular medicine at University of California, San Diego and investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He receives grant funding from the NIH, the Johns Hopkins ALS Center, the HighQ Foundation, and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. In 2020 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
The University of California, San Diego School of Medicine is the graduate medical school of the University of California, San Diego, a public land-grant research university in La Jolla, California. It was the third medical school in the University of California system, after those established at UCSF and UCLA, and is the only medical school in the San Diego metropolitan area. It is closely affiliated with the medical centers that are part of UC San Diego Health.
Latrepirdine is an antihistamine drug which has been used clinically in Russia since 1983.
Solanezumab is a monoclonal antibody being investigated by Eli Lilly as a neuroprotector for patients with Alzheimer's disease. The drug originally attracted extensive media coverage proclaiming it a breakthrough, but it has failed to show promise in Phase III trials.
Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) is a multisite study that aims to improve clinical trials for the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer's disease (AD). This cooperative study combines expertise and funding from the private and public sector to study subjects with AD, as well as those who may develop AD and controls with no signs of cognitive impairment. Researchers at 63 sites in the US and Canada track the progression of AD in the human brain with neuroimaging, biochemical, and genetic biological markers. This knowledge helps to find better clinical trials for the prevention and treatment of AD. ADNI has made a global impact, firstly by developing a set of standardized protocols to allow the comparison of results from multiple centers, and secondly by its data-sharing policy which makes available all at the data without embargo to qualified researchers worldwide. To date, over 1000 scientific publications have used ADNI data. A number of other initiatives related to AD and other diseases have been designed and implemented using ADNI as a model. ADNI has been running since 2004 and is currently funded until 2021.
The biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease are neurochemical indicators used to assess the risk or presence of the disease. The biomarkers can be used to diagnose Alzheimer's disease (AD) in a very early stage, but they also provide objective and reliable measures of disease progress. It is imperative to diagnose AD disease as soon as possible, because neuropathologic changes of AD precede the symptoms by years. It is well known that amyloid beta (Aβ) is a good indicator of AD disease, which has facilitated doctors to accurately pre-diagnose cases of AD. When Aβ peptide is released by proteolytic cleavage of amyloid-beta precursor protein, some Aβ peptides that are solubilized are detected in CSF and blood plasma which makes AB peptides a promising candidate for biological markers. It has been shown that the amyloid beta biomarker shows 80% or above sensitivity and specificity, in distinguishing AD from dementia. It is believed that amyloid beta as a biomarker will provide a future for diagnosis of AD and eventually treatment of AD.
Crenezumab is a fully humanized monoclonal antibody against human 1-40 and 1-42 beta amyloid, which is being investigated as a treatment of Alzheimer's disease. Crenezumab is highly homologous to solanezumab, another monoclonal antibody targeting amyloid-β peptides. In June 2022, the US National Institutes of Health announced that the drug failed as a medication for early-onset Alzheimer's disease following the results of a decade-long clinical trial.
Pinchas Cohen is the dean of the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, holds the William and Sylvia Kugel Dean's Chair in Gerontology and serves as the executive director of the Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center.
Paul Saltman was an American biologist who was Professor of Biology at the University of California, San Diego, for more than three decades, and an internationally renowned nutrition expert. He received a B.S. in chemistry (1949) and Ph.D. in biochemistry (1953) from the California Institute of Technology. He commenced employment at the Keck School of Medicine at USC, until 1967, when he accepted the position of provost of Revelle College at the University of California, San Diego, "to bring undergraduate education to the same high level of academic excellence that marks the graduate program at the heavily science-oriented college." In 1972 Saltman was appointed Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs. In 1980, he returned to full-time research and teaching at UCSD. After his death, from prostate cancer in 1999, the Paul D. Saltman Endowed Chair in Science Education was established by UCSD to recognize a distinguished senior member of Biological Sciences faculty for his/her commitment to, and success in teaching science. Saltman was married to Barbara Saltman for over 50 years, and is survived by sons David and Joshua, and five grandchildren.
Florbetaben, sold under the brand name Neuraceq, is a diagnostic radiotracer developed for routine clinical application to visualize β-amyloid plaques in the brain. It is a fluorine-18 (18F)-labeled stilbene derivative.
Don W. Cleveland is an American cancer biologist and neurobiologist.
Philip Scheltens is a Dutch professor of neurology and founder of the Alzheimer Centre, Amsterdam University Medical Centers, location VUmc in Amsterdam.
Blarcamesine is an experimental drug developed by Anavex Life Sciences.
The Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study (ADCS) was founded at University of California San Diego in 1991 and coordinates clinical trials of candidate treatments for Alzheimer's disease.
Lecanemab, sold under the brand name Leqembi, is a monoclonal antibody medication used for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease. Lecanemab is an amyloid beta-directed antibody. It is given via intravenous infusion. The most common side effects of lecanemab include headache, infusion-related reactions, and amyloid-related imaging abnormalities, a side effect known to occur with the class of antibodies targeting amyloid.
Paul-Peter Tak M.D. PhD FMedSci is an immunologist and academic specialising in the fields of internal medicine, rheumatology and immunology. Tak has been the President & CEO of Candel Therapeutics since September 2020.
Jennifer J. Manly is an American neuropsychologist. She is a Professor of Neuropsychology in Neurology at the Gertrude H. Sergievsky Center and the Taub Institute for Research in Aging and Alzheimer's Disease at Columbia University. Manly studies how race, culture, socioeconomic status, and education influence the risk of cognitive decline in aging.
Howard H Feldman is a professor of neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He was appointed director of the Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study (ADCS) in April 2016. Prior to joining UCSD, he served as the Executive Associate Dean for Research, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia (UBC) and was the director of the Alzheimer's and Related Disorders Clinic at UBC.