Giovanni Frisoni

Centre de la mémoire, Geneva University Hospital, Geneva, Switzerland

Giovanni Frisoni was educated in Brescia and Parma, Italy. In 1986, he obtained a degree cum laude in medicine and surgery, and in 1990, a specialization in neurology. Founder, with other doctors, of the Alzheimer's Unit at Brescia Hospital - which has since become the National Center for Alzheimer's Disease (IRCCS) Fatebenefratelli - there he was Head of the Psychogeriatrics Department and responsible for the Alzheimer Day Hospital.

Giovanni Frisoni created in 1999, within the IRCCS, the laboratory of epidemiology in neuroimaging and telemedicine (LENITEM) and the Unit of translational care; he was also, from 2013 to 2015, the Scientific Director of the IRCCS. Principal researcher of several projects at European and international level, he has also held technical and scientific positions in numerous research institutes.

His work focuses on the translation into clinical practice of fundamental discoveries in neuroimaging. He was appointed Full Professor in the Department of Psychiatry of the Faculty of Medicine in September 2013.

Frank Jessen

Director, Department of Psychiatry, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

Frank Jessen focuses on early detection of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in patients. A particular focus is on clinical and neuropsychological assessment as well as on MR-imaging. Frank Jessen is leading international initiatives to conceptualize the very first signs of AD, such as subjective cognitive decline (SCD). In that context, he is the coordinator of the multisite DELCODE study of the DZNE. Within DELCODE, patients from memory centers are sampled and followed longitudinally with the aim of improving disease course prediction and of developing new disease markers. Together with Michael Wagner, he is heading the clinical and neuropsychological assessment core of the DZNE clinical research section.

He is also strongly engaged in clinical trials in AD and he is the main author of the German guidelines on the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of dementia.

He serves on several boards, including the steering committee of the European Alzheimer’s Disease Consortium (EADC), the German Association for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics (DGPPN), the National Institute in Aging-Alzheimer’s Association (NIA-AA) working group for the development of the criteria of Alzheimer’s disease and on the ISTAART advisory council.

Charlotte Teunissen

Dept. Clinical Chemistry, VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam, Netherlands

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 in implementation of vitro diagnostic technologies for clinical routine lab analysis. She is responsible for the large well-characterised biobank of the Amsterdam Dementia cohort, containing >6000 paired CSF and serum samples of individuals visiting the memory clinical of the Alzheimer Center Amsterdam  (a.o. controls, patients with Alzheimer, 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 biomarkernetworks, such as the Society for Neurochemistry and routine CSF analysis and the Alzheimer 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.