The subject areas of the meeting will mostly be concerned with the role played by TDP-43 in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Its involvement in these and other neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease points to TDP-43 as a salient neuropathological protein. As a result, there is growing interest in developing new approaches to understand the consequences of TDP-43 mislocalization and aggregation in disease.

Even so, the precise function of TDP-43 in normal cells remains unclear, as are the initial events driving TDP-43 mislocalization and aggregation in disease, and the impact of TDP-43 pathology on neuronal integrity. The meeting organized in Trieste represents an ideal opportunity for discussing ongoing epidemiological, clinical, pathological, neuroimaging and genetic investigations of this protein. This venue will also serve as a platform for presenting and discussing the latest TDP-43 based therapeutic strategies that are being developed and tested in disease models.