Speakers

Dr. Eli Shobin is a strategic leader in the Alzheimer’s diagnostic space. At the ADDF, he leads the Diagnostic Accelerator overseeing program management, diligences, and the DxA speech consortium, SpeechDx.

Prior to the ADDF, Eli worked at Biogen where he served in various roles from biomarkers, corporate strategy, and commercial / marketing for both aducanumab and lecanemab. The majority of his time at Biogen was spent focused on Alzheimer’s disease and diagnostic strategy across disease areas. His time at Biogen followed a short stint in strategy consulting with Huron Consulting Group, where he developed commercial and scientific strategies for organizations looking to grow their business, particularly in areas of biomarkers, diagnostics, and neuroscience.

Eli received his PhD in Neuroscience from Boston University under Doug Rosene, where he studied lysosomal dysfunction and neuroimmunology in normal aging. He has contributed to over 10 publications, including, most recently, performance standards and recommendations for blood biomarkers in Alzheimer’s disease.

Aishu Sukumar is an Associate Director in the Health and Life Sciences team at Gates Ventures, where she oversees the Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) biomarker and diagnostics portfolio. In collaboration with the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF), Aishu manages the Diagnostics Accelerator, a venture philanthropy fund focused on advancing peripheral and digital biomarker development to bring scalable, minimally invasive, and low-cost diagnostics for AD to market. Additionally, she leads and supports workstreams related to biomarkers, diagnostics, and sustainability within multiple Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) initiatives, including the European Platform for Neurodegeneration (EPND), AD-RIDDLE, and SYNTHIA.

Prior to Gates Ventures, Aishu earned her MBA and MPH from the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business and School of Public Health. She also has a background in life sciences strategy consulting, specializing in commercialization strategy, revenue forecasting, competitive landscape assessment, drug pricing, and market access for pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Aishu had five years of biomedical research training across the Wyss Institute at Harvard Medical School, University of Cambridge, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. 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 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 >10,000 paired CSF and serum samples of individuals visiting the memory clinic of the Alzheimer Center Amsterdam  (a.o. controls, patients with Alzheimer’s, 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 biomarker networks, such as the Society for Neurochemistry and Routine CSF Analysis and the Alzheimer’s 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.  

Dr. Betty Tijms is an Associate Professor at the Alzheimer center Amsterdam. She has a background in neuroinformatics and leads a team that investigates molecular heterogeneity in patients. She is also the head of the Neurodegeneration program of Amsterdam Neuroscience.

Manu Vandijck is Product Development Manager at Fujirebio Europe NV.  He obtained an Industrial Engineer degree at Karel de Grote Hogeschool (Antwerp, Belgium) in 1996 and started immediately thereafter working at Fujirebio Europe (formerly Innogenetics) in the R&D Product Development group.

Since 2010, his focus and main responsibilities are linked to the Fujirebio Europe Neurodegeneration product portfolio.  He leads a team that develops new and relevant biomarker assays from defining the raw materials to full verification and validation for introduction into the market, and supports Alzheimer’s disease (AD) related market activities. Over the last few years, a successful release of Fujirebio’s fully automated platform in Europe, the LUMIPULSE G series, was achieved. On this platform, the team made Alzheimer’s CSF and plasma biomarker assays available that are globally implemented in general clinical testing labs and research institutes. As a representative for IVD-assay manufacturers, Manu is involved in several international working groups to increase standardization and use of biomarkers in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.

Dr. Zivjena Vucetic is a seasoned leader in medical diagnostics with over 15 years of experience in clinical development, regulatory strategy, and commercialization of innovative diagnostic technologies. Currently serving as Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President of Medical and Scientific Affairs at Beckman Coulter Diagnostics, Dr. Vucetic leads global medical strategy and evidence generation initiatives across multiple disease areas, including neurodegenerative disorders.

Previously, Dr. Vucetic held executive roles at Karius, Clinical Genomics, Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics, and Fujirebio Diagnostics, where she played a pivotal role in the development and adoption of first-in-class diagnostic biomarkers including liquid biopsy and metagenomic sequencing assays. She has successfully led clinical development of multiple breakthrough diagnostics leading to their regulatory approvals and built strategic partnerships with academic institutions, professional organizations, and biopharma companies to drive innovation and market adoption.

Dr. Vucetic completed a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Translational Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Temple University School of Medicine, and M.D. from the University of Zagreb.

Dr. Henrik Zetterberg is a Professor of Neurochemistry at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), and University College London (UK), and a Clinical Chemist at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg (Sweden). He is Head of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurochemistry at the University of Gothenburg, leads the UK DRI Fluid Biomarker Laboratory at UCL, and is a Key Member of the Hong Kong Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases and a Visiting Professor in the University of Wisconsin Department of Medicine, School of Medicine and Public Health (Madison, WI). His main research focus and clinical interest are fluid biomarkers for brain diseases, focusing on neurodegenerative diseases in particular.