David John Irwin

About

David John Irwin, MD, MTR, is an Associate Professor of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine. He is a member of the Penn Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics, an Associate Fellow and Internal Advisory Board Member of the Penn Institute on Aging, and co-Director of the Penn Frontotemporal Degeneration Center. His clinical expertise focuses on cognitive neurology and neurodegenerative diseases, including frontotemporal dementia, primary progressive aphasia, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, progressive supranuclear palsy, corticobasal syndrome, and multiple system atrophy, with a particular interest in young-onset dementia and the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia. His research interests center on neuropathology and biomarkers of neurodegenerative disease. He leads the Penn Digital Neuropathology Lab, which employs a multidisciplinary approach combining histopathology of human brain tissue with image analysis and bioinformatics to improve understanding of brain-behavior relationships and the diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases. His work aims to develop objective, reproducible digital image analysis tools for studying postmortem neuropathology, with the goal of translating these findings into new laboratory and imaging tests for detecting pathology in living patients. His research focuses on identifying diagnostic and prognostic markers of…

Research topics

• Medicine
• Biology
• Pathology
• Neuroscience
• Internal medicine
• Psychology
• Psychiatry
• Cell biology
• Genetics
• Chemistry

Selected publications

• SpaGCN: Integrating gene expression, spatial location and histology to identify spatial domains and spatially variable genes by graph convolutional network

  Nature Methods · 2021-10-28 · 1084 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Distribution patterns of tau pathology in progressive supranuclear palsy

  Acta Neuropathologica · 2020 · 459 citations

  Progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) is a 4R-tauopathy predominated by subcortical pathology in neurons, astrocytes, and oligodendroglia associated with various clinical phenotypes. In the present international study, we addressed the question of whether or not sequential distribution patterns can be recognized for PSP pathology. We evaluated heat maps and distribution patterns of neuronal, astroglial, and oligodendroglial tau pathologies and their combinations in different clinical subtypes of…

  DOI

• Positron Emission Tomography Imaging With [¹⁸F]flortaucipir and Postmortem Assessment of Alzheimer Disease Neuropathologic Changes

  JAMA Neurology · 2020 · 435 citations

  Importance: Positron emission tomography (PET) may increase the diagnostic accuracy and confirm the underlying neuropathologic changes of Alzheimer disease (AD). Objective: To determine the accuracy of antemortem [18F]flortaucipir PET images for predicting the presence of AD-type tau pathology at autopsy. Design, Setting, and Participants: This diagnostic study (A16 primary cohort) was conducted from October 2015 to June 2018 at 28 study sites (27 in US sites and 1 in Australia). Individuals wit…

  DOI

• Neurofilament Light Chain as a Biomarker for Cognitive Decline in Parkinson Disease

  Movement Disorders · 2021 · 170 citations

  BACKGROUND: Neurofilament light chain protein (NfL) is a promising biomarker of neurodegeneration. OBJECTIVES: To determine whether plasma and CSF NfL (1) associate with motor or cognitive status in Parkinson's disease (PD) and (2) predict future motor or cognitive decline in PD. METHODS: Six hundred and fifteen participants with neurodegenerative diseases, including 152 PD and 200 healthy control participants, provided a plasma and/or cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) NfL sample. Diagnostic groups were…

  DOI

• Utility of the global CDR^® plus NACC FTLD rating and development of scoring rules: Data from the ARTFL/LEFFTDS Consortium

  Alzheimer s & Dementia · 2020 · 161 citations

  INTRODUCTION: plus NACC FTLD to detect and track early frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) and to conduct clinical trials in FTLD. METHODS: The CDR plus NACC FTLD rating was applied to 970 sporadic and familial participants from the baseline visit of Advancing Research and Treatment in Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration (ARTFL)/Longitudinal Evaluation of Familial Frontotemporal Dementia Subjects (LEFFTDS). Each of the eight domains of the CDR plus NACC FTLD was equally weighed in determining…

  DOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant K23NS088341

  NIH · $836k · 2019

• Administrative Core

  NIH · $31.1M · 2020–2030

• Microscopic and Large-Scale Networks of Molecular Pathology in Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration

  NIH · $3.8M · 2019–2025

Frequent coauthors

• Keith A. Johnson

  Massachusetts General Hospital

  729 shared

• D. Cheng

  567 shared

• Murray Grossman

  546 shared

• Joseph C. Wu

  486 shared

• John Q. Trojanowski

  University of Pennsylvania

  455 shared

• Monte S. Buchsbaum

  University of California, Irvine

  405 shared

• Marcelo F. Di Carli

  Harvard University

  405 shared

• Carl K. Hoh

  University of California, San Diego

  405 shared

Labs

• Irwin LabPI

Similar researchers at University of Pennsylvania

• Craig B. Thompsonh-277
• Daniel J Raderh-236