Lluís Riera Ponsati
Director - Preclinical Development Neumirna Therapeutics
Lluís Riera Ponsati, PhD, is Director of Preclinical Development at Neumirna Therapeutics, where he leads the preclinical pipeline of miRNA-based therapies. A neuroscientist by training, he earned his PhD in Neuroimmunology from the University of Copenhagen (BRIC) and completed a postdoc at the Center for RNA Medicine, Aalborg University. Lluís has devoted most of his career to Parkinson’s disease, first investigating molecular mechanisms of disease and now developing novel RNA therapeutics at Neumirna
Seminars
Tuesday 1st December 2026
Fireside Chat: New Efforts & Technologies to Avoid Invasive Lumbar Puncture – Comparing Blood- Based Biomarkers, Imaging Biomarkers, Olfactory Neurons, Extracellular Vesicles & Emerging Minimally Invasive Approaches
1:30 pm
- Address the critical operational and patient burden challenges driving the urgent need for CSF alternatives: European sites increasingly unwilling to perform lumbar punctures, staff training requirements across multi-site trials, and the strategic limitations when you cannot run studies in Europe that force programmes to the US or abandon biomarker strategies entirely
- Compare the full spectrum of emerging technologies that eliminate lumbar puncture: ultrasensitive plasma biomarkers, achieving CSF-level correlations for trial pre-screening, olfactory bulb neurons providing direct CNS access, neuronalenriched extracellular vesicles and accessible peripheral nerve sampling that reflects brain pathology without invasive CNS procedures
- Debate practical implementation realities and validation status: which approaches show sufficient plasma-CSF correlation to confidently replace lumbar puncture in your specific indication, how exploratory technologies like EVs and olfactory sampling balance biological promise against current lack of standardisation and clinical validation
