DR. MICHAEL ROSENBLOOM

39 Clinical director Health Partners Center for Memory and Aging, St. Paul, Minn.

When Dr. Michael Rosenbloom was an undergraduate student at Johns Hopkins University, he took an entry-level psychology course that set him on a path to become one of the principal investigators for a potentially game-changing discovery in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. “I was fascinated by how you could relate brain structure to abstract things like memory and behavior,” Rosenbloom said. He went on to medical school at Columbia University. During a rotation at Harlem Hospital, he was consistently drawn to the patients with memory loss issues and has been working with that population ever since. After completing his fellowship in behavioral neurology in 2010, he began work at Health Partners on a possible treatment for Alzheimer’s that works by spraying a mist of intranasal insulin directly into the brain, bypassing the blood-brain barrier. Additionally, he is leading the trial for IDEAS ( Imaging Dementia Evidence for Amyloid Scanning) to help identify Alzheimer’s patients and give them a definitive diagnosis. “I think we are understanding this disease much better than we ever have before,” Rosenbloom said. “We used to only see patients with late-stage or advanced dementia, and now there is a push to treat and identify the disease much earlier.” Rosenbloom also created the health system’s Partners in Dementia program, which pairs firstyear medical students with memory loss patients in an effort to get them to learn from each other. “There are so many exciting developments in this field, so many clinical trial opportunities. Even 10 years ago, we weren’t this sophisticated, and you even see the enthusiasm for this research in the National Institutes of Health funding. I think we are going to have new and better ways to treat this disease very soon.”

“I think we are going to have new and better ways to treat this disease very soon.”