Growing up down the street from his grandparents, Dr. Jeremy Tanner was in high school when he saw his grandmother change as dementia took hold. “It was painful to watch,” he said. “The impact it had on her, but also on my grandfather and our whole family.”
His feelings of helplessness fueled a lifelong mission to find answers for families facing neurogenerative diseases. During college, Jeremy spent a summer working alongside his grandmother’s dementia physician at Baylor College of Medicine, an experience that solidified his path forward.
Today, Jeremy has two young daughters and is a cognitive and behavioral neurologist at the Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, an LBDA Research Center of Excellence (RCOE). He leads LBDA’s Clin-SYN biomarkers study to develop tools that can identify LBD earlier and more accurately.
In recent decades, similar Alzheimer’s biomarker studies led to the first FDA-approved disease-modifying therapies. Jeremy and his colleagues believe the LBD field is approaching a similar breakthrough. “We went from having no clinically accessible tools five years ago to now having multiple ways to test for these proteins,” he said. “We’re really at the cusp. It’s an exciting time.”
In the short term, this research will help doctors better understand each patient’s unique disease and guide more personalized care. Long term, it lays the foundation for clinical trials and future therapies that could slow or even prevent disease progression.
Jeremy is especially encouraged by the increasing collaboration and scientific advances shaping the future of LBD research. “The Lewy Body Dementia Association has played a critical role in bringing together the patient community, scientific community, and industry partners to move research forward faster,” he says.
Even with the challenges ahead, Jeremy remains hopeful about what the future holds for LBDA research. “It’s been more than 100 years to get here,” he said. “But we’re finally at a point where real progress is happening.”
