Marc Diamond, M.D.

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Marc Diamond, M.D., founded the Center for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases (CAND) in 2014 and has directed it since then. The CAND is a multidisciplinary translational research program whose mission is to improve the diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders. Under his leadership, the center has grown to include 10 primary faculty members and nearly 100 scientists, trainees, and staff. Within 25,000 square feet of shared space, the CAND supports collaborative research using atomic-resolution structural biology, biophysics, biochemistry, cell biology, animal models, and neuropathology.

Dr. Diamond’s original discoveries linked common conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease to rare infectious neurodegenerative disorders such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. His lab determined that specific disease-causing assemblies of the tau protein are infectious: they move between cells and serve as templates for their own replication, just as bona fide prions do. His work has elucidated the cellular and molecular mechanisms of this process and identified related mechanisms involving other proteins implicated in neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia. These discoveries have transformed our understanding of how different neurodegenerative diseases arise and why they progress. The Diamond lab is applying these insights to develop advanced therapies. Researchers worldwide now use tools and methods developed by Dr. Diamond to study neurodegenerative diseases, and his ideas underlie new treatment strategies that the pharmaceutical industry is pursuing.

Dr. Diamond received his A.B. in history from Princeton University in 1987 and his M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), in 1993. He completed his neurology residency at UCSF in 1997, serving as chief resident in his final year. He worked with Keith Yamamoto, Ph.D., as a Howard Hughes Medical Student Research Fellow (1989–1991) and as a postdoctoral fellow (1997–2001). He served on the faculty of the Department of Neurology at UCSF from 2002 to 2009, then as the David Clayson Professor of Neurology at Washington University in St. Louis from 2009 to 2014. Since 2014, he has served as a professor of neurology and neuroscience at UT Southwestern Medical Center, where he holds the Effie Marie Cain Distinguished University Chair in Alzheimer’s Research.

Dr. Diamond is an internationally recognized expert in neurodegenerative disease and frequently presents his ideas at major universities and scientific meetings around the world. His scientific colleagues have cited his discoveries thousands of times.