Professor Matthew Kiernan

speaker

72 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 31 Jul

Professor Matthew Kiernan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Health Report · An Alzheimer's blood test is on the way. What could that mean for you? · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

Well, thank you both.

Yeah, well, this really reflects probably three to four decades of work by researchers and clinicians globally.

And as you say, Norman, it's not our test.

This is a test that is done by different diagnostic platforms.

And it's been, for instance, approved in America by the FDA.

And as you know, it's very hard to get things through the FDA.

And now we've signed a partnership with Roche Diagnostics to test the assay in the Australian population with the intent of getting reference data that could then be taken forward so that ultimately it will become a Medicare item number.

So by reference data... For that to happen, you need reference data.

You need Australian data.

Exactly.

So it's looking for phosphorylated tau.

So tau is, and this is, again, a controversial field of neurology.

what is the basis for Alzheimer's disease?

And the two key proteins that you will hear a lot about and we talk about all the time are amyloid and tau.

So this is part of a protein that is cleaved off and it's residual in the blood.

So at the moment, the way that we diagnose Alzheimer's disease is we do a PET scan.

So we do a radio tracer ligand, nuclear ligand that we inject

goes up into the brain, and it can either be an amyloid tracer, so amyloid lights up, or a tau tracer.

But that's not universally available.

It's only available in a few centres around Australia, and it's expensive, $5,000 to $7,000.

Showing 1–20 of 72 · page 1 of 4