Resident Physician in the Department of Nuclear Medicine, LMU University Hospital, Munich

Hannah Zamore is an MD-PhD student in her graduate phase at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio (USA). She is completing her PhD in the lab of Dr. Allison Kraus, studying protein misfolding in the context of neurodegenerative disease. Her project focuses on the co-occurence of tau and alpha-synuclein seeds and aggregates in Lewy body diseases. Clinically, she is interested in pursuing specialized training in emergency medicine and neurocritical care with the hopes of studying neurodegeneration following traumatic brain injury.

Gianluigi Zanusso is an associate professor of neurology at the Department of Neuroscience, Biomedicine and Movement Sciences, University of Verona, Italy. He has long-dated experience in clinical, neuropathologic, and biochemical aspects of prion human disorders and other neurodegenerative disorders diagnostics. The main focus of his studies has been the involvement of the olfactory system in neurodegeneration, in particular, the olfactory mucosa. He invented and set up olfactory swabbing to collect olfactory neuroepithelial cells from the nasal vault. Olfactory swabs were analyzed by Real-Time Quaking Inducing Conversion Assay (RT-QuIC), a specific and ultra-sensitive prion assay, showing a diagnostic accuracy of nearly 100% for Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease diagnosis. Misfolded alpha-synuclein aggregates were also detected in olfactory neuroepithelium of patients with Parkinson’s disease, Dementia with Lewy bodies and idiopathic REM sleep behavior disorder. This approach had been currently adapted to the detection of pathological TDP-43 in patients with genetic frontotemporal dementia associated to TDP-43 pathology.

Dr Zelek trained in Chemistry and after a few years in the Biotech sector, returned to academia and undertook a PhD in Immunology (2016 – 2019), focused on the complement system. During her PhD she created a toolkit of novel complement inhibitors and continued this work in two personal Fellowships (ISSF Wellcome Trust, Health and Care Research Wales), developing patent-protected therapeutic candidates (PCT/EP2020/073430) and unique tool reagents for the study of complement in disease models. She is currently the holder of a highly prestigious five-year Fellowship funded by Race Against Dementia and Alzheimer’s Research UK (RAD-ARUK Fellow) and has been awarded the highly coveted Emerging Leader status in the UK Dementia Research Institute. Dr. Zelek has an outstanding scientific record for her early career stage; she has 35 publications in international leading journals and has won multiple national and international prizes and awards, including the highly competitive McGuigan Outstanding PhD Thesis Prize and the Lambris Complement Training Award (recognition of an excellent research contribution). Her research spans from understanding how neuroinflammation and complement dysregulation drive damage in the brain through to the development of novel drugs to target these drivers.

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 UW Department of Medicine, School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison, Wisconsin. His main research focus and clinical interest are fluid biomarkers for brain diseases, neurodegenerative diseases in particular.