An article published in Nature Medicine from neurologists Kanta Horie, PhD, Chihiro Sato, PhD, Nupur Ghoshal, MD, PhD, Randall Bateman, MD, and colleagues has won the International Society to Advance Alzheimer’s Research and Treatment (ISTAART) 2023 Publication of the Year Award. The article is titled, “CSF tau microtubule-binding region identifies pathological changes in primary tauopathies.”
According to the ISTAART website, the award recognizes the “most impactful publication in the participating PIA’s field over the previous calendar year.”
In order to be eligible, the publications must be relevant to the participating PIA’s field that were first published the previous year.
The article details how the researchers used mass spectrometry methods to find fragments of tau protein in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that can distinguish subset of primary tauopathies such as corticobasal degeneration (CBD) and frontotemporal lobar degeneration with MAPT mutations (FTLD-MAPT) from cognitively normal population and other tauopathies.
These fragments increase in the brain in aggregates, while they inversely decrease in the CSF. CSF tau signatures serve as the first biomarker for primary tauopathies.
This research opened the door to clinical trials for primary tauopathies that was challenging due to lack of biomarkers.
Horie, K., Barthélemy, N.R., Spina, S. et al. CSF tau microtubule-binding region identifies pathological changes in primary tauopathies. Nat Med 28, 2547–2554 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-022-02075-9