Over the past 20 years, AFTD’s Pilot Grant program, which supports early-career researchers or new ideas, has funded $2.8 million in innovative FTD research. In 2005, AFTD founder Helen-Ann Comstock and a small group of medical advisors awarded $35,000 to Eileen Bigio, MD, a clinical researcher at Northwestern University, to identify abnormal proteins present in…

FTD researchers know the importance of identifying and validating usable biomarkers for FTD – and just how complex these tasks are.  FTD-specific biomarkers could help to achieve many unmet needs for families and researchers: improved diagnostic accuracy and sensitivity, improved prognosis prediction, identification of which people suffer from which types of pathology, and accelerated drug…