AAIC 2026 is underway, and the readouts drawing the most attention this year sit outside amyloid.

That reflects a real shift: across 155 active Alzheimer's programs, neuroinflammation now leads amyloid by count, 31 to 28. Yet only amyloid has produced an approved disease-modifying drug. Breadth has arrived. Proof has not.

So AAIC is a mechanism-selection meeting, not an amyloid update. It also opens the densest run of non-amyloid readouts the field has seen: eight binary catalysts from AAIC into early 2027 across tau, neuroinflammation, and the first oral DMT gates.

Three programs set the narrative. Diranersen, the tau ASO, brings the first full dataset pairing CSF tau reduction with a cognitive signal, though CELIA missed its primary endpoint and the benefit sits in secondary analyses. XPro1595 tries to turn precision neuroinflammation into a structural MRI endpoint, not one more biomarker story. And the oral DMTs, AR1001 in Q3 and buntanetap early next year, face a wall no oral non-amyloid drug has cleared: Phase 3 in Alzheimer's.

The pipeline is in motion. Whether it has momentum is what the next six months answer.