Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Fiona Elwood, VP and Neurodegeneration Disease Area Stronghold leader at J&J Innovative Medicine discusses the challenges in developing new therapies for neurodegenerative diseases in part because of the heterogeneity of the patient population.  She highlights the difficulty in defining the subsets of these diseases and identifying the right patients for clinical trials. Emphasizing the importance of early detection, J&J Innovative Medicine is developing strategies to support the move to precision medicine in treating diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to prevent patients from moving to a symptomatic stage of disease.   Fiona explains, "For example, in Alzheimer's disease, as many people know, one of the primary symptoms is dementia, but dementia is a symptom. There can be other reasons why people develop forms of dementia. Alzheimer's disease is a specific disease where now we know patients can be defined by the pathology in the patient's brain. So specifically, the patients develop amylo