Niklas Mattsson had always been interested in cognition and the biology of how it goes awry. Attending medical school to become a neurologist seemed a no-brainer.
But after a year working in a neurology clinic, where many of his patients suffered from Alzheimer's disease, he found that medicine wasn't quite the right fit for him. “I enjoyed working with patients — it was very rewarding,” he says. “But it did not give me the opportunity to really focus on basic disease mechanisms.” Research on animal models or cellular processes also held little allure, because it would take him too far away from the clinic.
So in 2008, he embarked on a joint clinical and research residency in neurochemistry at Sahlgrenska University Hospital at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, where he found his niche in biomarker discovery. “Biomarkers are really in vivo measurements of the pathology of the disease, so it's an opportunity to investigate the disease mechanisms on a patient level,” he says. His dissertation research, which he hopes to defend in December, focuses on protein biomarkers in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF).
His work has moved quickly. In 2009, he was the first author on a multi-centre study of 1,500 subjects, which confirmed that levels of three CSF proteins could be used to identify people with Alzheimer's disease (N. Mattsson et al. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 302, 385–393; 2009); it was the largest-ever study of such biomarkers. “I think the area is a very fruitful one for young scientists,” says Mattsson.
But after a year working in a neurology clinic, where many of his patients suffered from Alzheimer's disease, he found that medicine wasn't quite the right fit for him. “I enjoyed working with patients — it was very rewarding,” he says. “But it did not give me the opportunity to really focus on basic disease mechanisms.” Research on animal models or cellular processes also held little allure, because it would take him too far away from the clinic.
So in 2008, he embarked on a joint clinical and research residency in neurochemistry at Sahlgrenska University Hospital at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, where he found his niche in biomarker discovery. “Biomarkers are really in vivo measurements of the pathology of the disease, so it's an opportunity to investigate the disease mechanisms on a patient level,” he says. His dissertation research, which he hopes to defend in December, focuses on protein biomarkers in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF).
His work has moved quickly. In 2009, he was the first author on a multi-centre study of 1,500 subjects, which confirmed that levels of three CSF proteins could be used to identify people with Alzheimer's disease (N. Mattsson et al. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 302, 385–393; 2009); it was the largest-ever study of such biomarkers. “I think the area is a very fruitful one for young scientists,” says Mattsson.
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