Maria L. Maccecchini PhD Maria Maccecchini founded Annovis Bio, Inc. to develop treatments for Alzheimer’s (AD), Parkinson’s (PD) and other neurodegenerative diseases by normalizing axonal transport and restoring homeostasis in the brain. The company is developing three classes of drugs for the treatment of neurodegeneration. One targets chronic conditions like AD and PD and may stop the progression of the diseases. The second one targets acute conditions, like Traumatic Brain Injury and Stroke. Whereas the third one targets late stage AD and may stabilize the decline. ANVS-401, the lead compound, successfully completed three phase I and two phase 2 studies demonstrating that improves cognition in AD measured by ADAScog and WAIS and motor function in PD measured by UPDRS and WAIS. As expected it is safe; enters the brain; restores axonal transport by normalizing brain levels of neurotoxic proteins back to the levels seen in healthy normal volunteers; reduces inflammation and protects nerve cells from dying. Dr. Maccecchini did one postdoc at Caltech and one at the Roche Institute of Immunology, her PhD in biochemistry is from the Biocenter of Basel with a 2-year visiting fellowship at The Rockefeller University.

I hold a BSc in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the New University of Lisbon. After graduating in 2012, I enrolled in the MSc in Molecular Genetics and Diagnostics program at the University of Nottingham. That is when my passion for research into neurodegenerative disorders started, after doing my Master's research project in Alzheimer's disease with Professor Kevin Morgan. From 2014 until the end of 2017, I worked as a research technician in the Hens Lab at the University of Oxford, looking to develop new genetic tools using synthetic promoters in Drosophila Melanogaster. In 2018, I enrolled into the GABBA PhD Program, from the University of Porto. I am currently doing my PhD research project with Professor Richard Wade-Martins, looking into LRRK2 and how it regulates mitochondrial and lysosomal activity, using different models of Parkinson's disease.

Associate Professor of Neurology; Zanjan University of Medical Sciences

I studied Biotechnology at the Università degli Studi di Varese Insubria. I did my master thesis in the laboratory for biomedical neuroscience where I started also my PhD. Now I am a three year PhD student and I am working on the role of Tau in epigenetic.

My academic career has largely focused on understanding pathology and developing therapies to treat a variety of neurological disorders. The first part of my research career was spent at Cardiff University working on lysosomal storage diseases, with my PhD centred on Niemann-Pick type C. Whilst here I set up and ran a zebrafish colony in the Lloyd-Evans lab to generate in vivo zebrafish models of several lysosomal diseases. Following this, I worked for 10 months as a Research Associate at Bristol University investigating cell competition. It was at this point that I realised that my passion lay in researching neurodegenerative diseases, prompting a move back to Cardiff where I worked as a research associate in Prof Nick Allen’s lab using iPSC-derived microglia monocultures to investigate the role of the Alzheimer’s disease risk gene R522 in the enzyme PLCG2. Following the success of this project, I was recruited to Prof Julie Williams’ lab to generate and characterise microglia monocultures from iPSC-cells representing both high and low polygenic risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

Naďa Majerníková started her PhD at theUniversity Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) in October 2020. In her project shefocuses on studying the role of ferroptosis in Alzheimer's disease (AD) byusing a brain on a chip platform and AD-patient-derived induced pluripotentstem cells (iPSCs), as well as AD and control post mortem brain tissue. Beforeher PhD she graduated from a Bachelor in Cellular Biology and Physiology at TheUniversity of Lille, France and then obtained her Master diploma with Cum laudein Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience (Clinical and Molecular track) at theUniversity of Groningen, the Netherlands. During her studies, she acquired avast variety of scientific skills by performing research projects in differentresearch groups all over the world including France (Bordeaux, M. Landryresearch group), the Netherlands (Middelburg and Groningen, G. Rijkers andO.Sibon research group), Germany (Munich, T. Czopka research group) andAustralia (Melbourne, A.Maier research group). She worked with different modelorganisms such as mice, Drosophila, Zebrafish, as well as in clinical settingwith geriatric inpatients. She obtained multiple personal grants including themerit-based MERMOZ grant (€1,313.35), personal GUF grant for outstanding Masterstudents (€1,200.00) and the de Cock grant for additional funding of her PhDresearch (€4,000.00). You could see her present her research at the DutchNeuroscience Meeting, Dutch Pharmacology Society meeting and the ISCOMS 2019 conferencewhere her talk was awarded with “Breakingnews talk” award.

I am doing my PhD studies in the group of Professor Agneta Nordberg at Karolinska Institute. Our translational group is specialised in Positron Emission Tomography. We characterise and try to understand the binding properties of newly designed PET tracers in different dementias. My research focuses on tracing Tau pathology in Alzheimer's disease and Frontotemporal dementia subtypes in comparison to other hallmarks such as inflammatory markers, in human brains.

Maura Malpetti has been recently appointed as a Race Against Dementia and Alzheimer's Research UK fellow at the University of Cambridge (UK), where she earned her PhD in Clinical Neurosciences last year. She originally trained in Italy for a BSc in Psychology and an MSc in Cognitive Neurosciences, where she worked with FDG PET. She is interested in the study of neuropathology, biomarkers and clinical features of neurodegenerative diseases, with special interest in frontotemporal lobar degeneration and Alzheimer's disease. Her research focusses on multimodal biomarkers to investigate the pathophysiology of these conditions, in order to identify early diagnostic and prognostic markers. Specifically, she is studying novel PET tracers and other biomarkers for inflammation, tau and synaptic loss, with an interdisciplinary approach that integrates multimodal imaging and clinical data with fluid markers and post-mortem pathology.

Dr. Viet Man earned his BS and MS of Physics from Hanoi University of Science in Vietnam. He completed his PhD study in biophysics and received doctorate degree of Physics from Institute of Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland). In 2017, He joined School of Pharmacy in University of Pittsburgh after his postdoctoral fellow at Department of Physics, North Carolina State University. His research interests focus on protein misfolding, amyloid aggregation and Alzheimer's Disease.