Narrow Results

The following topics are under this section:

• Preclinical data demonstrates favourable safety profile of novel anti-HER3 antibody
• Phase III clinical trial reveals positive results for cancer immunotherapy in treating the most common form of liver cancer
• Strategic partnership to bring hope to patients with fibrotic and inflammatory diseases
• Hong Kong’s first Mononuclear Cell Bank attains AABB accreditation
• Expanding reach of Biosimilar candidates in Taiwan and Hong Kong
• Developing Novel Cancer Therapies with Greater Precision
• Singapore-based MedTech Start-up raises US$ 4 million in funding
• Asia’s HealthTech Momentum Remains Strong at US$ 5 billion in 2019
• Emergex raises more than US$ 11 million in Series A Round
• Korean-based biotechnology company seals exclusive sales agreement

The following topics are under this section:

• Empowering Communities Key to Reaching Universal Health Goals
• Precision Medicine Using Innovative Biotherapeutics

Late-onset Alzheimer’s disease (LOAD) is a polygenic disorder with a long prodromal phase, making early diagnosis challenging. Twin studies estimate LOAD as 60-80% heritable, and while common genetic variants can account for 30% of this heritability, nearly 70% remains “missing”. Polygenic risk scores (PRS) leverage combined effects of many loci to predict LOAD risk, but often lack sensitivity to preclinical disease changes, limiting clinical utility. Our group has built and published on a resilience phenotype to model better-than-expected cognition give amyloid pathology burden and hypothesized it may assist in preclinical polygenic risk prediction. Thus, we built a LOAD PRS and a resilience PRS and evaluated both in predicting cognition in a dementia-free cohort (N=254). The LOAD PRS had a significant main effect on baseline memory (β=-0.18, P=1.68E-03). Both the LOAD PRS (β=-0.03, P=1.19E-03) and the resilience PRS (β=0.02, P=0.03) had significant main effects on annual memory decline. The resilience PRS interacted with CSF Aβ on baseline memory (β=-6.04E-04, P=0.02), whereby it predicted baseline memory among Aβ+ individuals (β=0.44, P=0.01) but not among Aβ- individuals (β=0.06, P=0.46). Excluding APOE from PRS resulted in mainly LOAD PRS associations attenuating, but notably the resilience PRS interaction with CSF Aβ and selective prediction among Aβ+ individuals was consistent. Although the resilience PRS is currently somewhat limited in scope from the phenotype’s cross-sectional nature, our results suggest that the resilience PRS may be a promising tool in assisting in preclinical disease risk prediction among dementia-free and Aβ+ individuals, though replication and fine-tuning are needed.