Alzheimer’s Disease eats away at your brain before symptoms even show up.

AD is driven by a misfolded protein called tau, which essentially clogs up the brain and kills neurons irreversibly. Misfolded tau induces other tau to misfold, essentially spreading across the brain’s connectome like a contact disease.

The thing is, this looks different for everyone–but time is of the essence, and clinicians can’t waste time and money on treatments that might not work when the brain is actively deteriorating.

I’m building TauPropagation, a network diffusion model (or reaction diffusion if I can get someone to help me out) to predict tau propagation throughout the brain in Alzheimer’s disease. Not only will this help clinicians make better treatment decisions, but it also serves as a basis for modeling how drugs (like monoclonal antibodies) might clear tau, which will hopefully be the second branch of this project.

A lot of math and a lot of computer science and a lot of fumbling with biological variables but we’ll make it through.