Ó³»­´«Ã½

On October 22nd, 2025, Brain Aging Symposium took place at Harvard Medical School bringing together leading researchers from academia and partner organizations to discuss recent advances in measuring and monitoring human brain aging trajectories, with a particular focus on Alzheimer's disease (AD). A central theme emerged: achieving "the right treatment for the right person and the right time" through precision medicine approaches. Key advances included the unprecedented validation of plasma-based biomarkers, particularly brain-derived p-Tau217 that can identify seeding AD pathology with remarkable specificity, making large-scale screening newly feasible. Integrating multi-level "omic" modalities, spanning genetic information, molecular biomarkers of nutrition, lipid and protein signatures, neuroimaging measures, cognitive assessments, and lifestyle factors, enhances disease risk modeling and trajectory prediction beyond the capacity of any single marker. Early findings highlight critical roles for nutritional and lipid metabolism, and myelin integrity in brain aging, with cell and sex-specific vulnerabilities identified in response to nutrition, social isolation, and metabolic stress. Computational approaches that combine single-cell genomics, epigenomics, and artificial intelligence have been shown to accelerate causal discovery and therapeutic development. However, significant challenges remain: current biomarkers explain only half the variance in cognitive decline, racial and ethnic differences in biomarker levels lack mechanistic understanding, and scalable tools for comprehensive brain aging assessment are needed. The symposium underscored that preventing AD will require intervening during the preclinical asymptomatic phase. These multimodal screening platforms, coupled with mechanistically driven therapeutics, reduction in modifiable risk factors, including nutrition, vascular health, and social determinants of health, could profoundly impact the field.