Held in Boston’s Park Plaza Hotel, this year’s CTAD conference filled its chosen venue to fire regulation capacity. The space bustled with scientists heading to talks, posters, and various private meetings in rooms up and down the hallways. Despite a notable absence of success stories for large trials, a sense of optimism pervaded the scene, which stands in marked contrast to a public perception of all-failure-all-the-time in Alzheimer disease trials. True, verubecestat data was flat-out negative in mild to moderate AD and some scientists began to fret about a possible class effect, but on the other hand, several anti-Aβ antibodies posted evidence of removing amyloid plaque reasonably safely from the human brain, and all breaks were off on prep work for multiple large-scale prevention trials in the preclinical phase of this long disease. CTAD news ran the gamut from creative approaches to developing drugs (think young men’s plasma fraction) to creative approaches to measuring subtle cognitive change (think burst mobile tests and digital pen), to on-the-spot ApoE genotyping (think cube). Learn the latest with our 13-part news series.