Emerging Biomakers in Perpheral Neuropathy Beyond Neurofilament Light Chain: Brett Morrison, MD, PhD

WATCH TIME: 3 minutes

“The challenge is finding biomarkers that change over a timeframe that is meaningful for clinical trials. That's where things like muscle MRI become really exciting, because they may allow us to detect disease progression long before traditional clinical scales can.”

The search for reliable biomarkers in peripheral nerve disorders has accelerated in recent years, driven by the need for more objective measures of disease progression and treatment response. While neurofilament light chain (NfL) has emerged as the most widely utilized biomarker across many neuromuscular conditions, researchers continue to explore additional tools that may provide greater disease specificity or detect meaningful changes earlier in the disease course.

Several promising candidates have begun to attract attention, particularly in inherited and immune-mediated neuropathies. Advances in muscle MRI, immune pathway profiling, and molecular biomarkers such as microRNAs are providing new ways to quantify nerve and muscle pathology. These approaches may prove especially valuable in conditions where traditional clinical outcome measures change slowly, making it difficult to evaluate therapeutic efficacy within the timeframe of a clinical trial.

At the 2026 Peripheral Nerve Society (PNS) Annual Meeting, held June 13-16 in Maastricht, Netherlands, Brett Morrison, MD, PhD, associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, presented a talk on the current and future biomarkers for peripheral nerve diseases. Following his talk, he sat down to discuss several emerging biomarker strategies that could complement NfL in these patient populations. In this clip, Morrison highlighted the growing role of muscle MRI in inherited neuropathies, the potential utility of immune-targeted biomarkers in inflammatory conditions, and the ongoing investigation of microRNAs as future tools for diseases such as diabetic peripheral neuropathy.

Click here for more PNS 2026 coverage.