Established in 2024, the Morby Prize is awarded annually to the senior and first authors of a recent scientific publication that transforms the fundamental understanding of Alzheimer’s disease and opens new paths to translate scientific results into effective ways to prevent, diagnose, or treat the disease. The Morby Prize is named in honor of the late Co-Founder of Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, Jeffrey L. Morby, who inspired the nonprofit’s mission 22 years ago to fund research as a path to ending Alzheimer’s disease.

Senior co-author Randall J. Bateman, M.D., and first co-author Kanta Horie, Ph.D. (both of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis), along with senior co-author Oskar Hansson, M.D., Ph.D., and first co-author Gemma Salvadó, Ph.D. (both of Lund University, Sweden), were selected by their peers for their paper “Plasma MTBR-tau243 biomarker identifies tau tangle pathology in Alzheimer’s disease,” published in Nature Medicine in March 2025.

The paper describes MTBR-tau243, the first scalable, accurate biomarker that can be assessed in blood to indicate whether someone has Alzheimer’s-specific tau pathology in their brain. In years to come, MTBR-tau243 testing could be a transformative tool for diagnosing and staging an individual’s Alzheimer’s disease, bringing the promise of precision medicine closer to reality.