Silvana Konermann

I guess 17 years ago or so.

And that really stuck with me because it felt like, why didn't we understand how it's starting?

Why didn't we have a therapy?

There are all these very observable changes happening.

And so that got me interested in disease.

biology and specifically complex diseases, where Alzheimer's is a complex disease.

What that means is it sounds, oh, it's just complicated, but that's not what it means.

It means that there are multiple different risk factors, and basically every patient has a unique combination of risk factors for a disease.

That's different from an infection, where you have one cause.

That's right.

So heart disease, many cancers, obviously not accidents, but stroke and Alzheimer's disease, these are all complex diseases.

Basically, yeah.

Basically, all of these have a combination of genetic changes, environmental factors, and each patient is unique.

They have a unique combination of risk factors.

And so we've been really struggling, I guess, as a scientific community, understanding what do all these different patients have in common that we could target and then fix the disease.

I think there are now three things really that have come together really just in the last one or two years that make it possible to understand such a complex problem like Alzheimer's disease and other diseases like it.

And that's at the high level three areas.

If you kind of summarize it really quickly, it's

measuring, changing and understanding.

And so measuring, what that means for us is really single-cell sequencing.