Infections, Alzheimer's, and AlzPI; patient-led, global interdisciplinary collaboration

Nikki Schultek, Executive Director of AlzPI shares her story of chronic illness and chronic infection then explains how this has led to building global, interdisciplinary research collaborations. AlzPI brings experts together from a variety of domains to address decades of research associating infections with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. This team aims to develop a consensus detection protocol to accurately and precisely identify infections in patients living with dementia, while also unveiling disease mechanisms linking infections with the development of inflammation and pathology. This is truly a precision medicine concept to identify a subset of patients that may have active, ongoing infection(s) as the primary driver of their neurodegeneration. Identification of this subset of people would allow for the use of repurposed anti-infective drugs and encourage the development of new agents to address these infections and their inflammatory cascade.