A sensor identifies misfolded protein biomarkers in the blood. This offers a chance to detect Alzheimer’s disease before any symptoms occur. Researchers intend to bring it to market maturity.
Alzheimer’s disease has a symptom-free period of 15 to 20 years before the first clinical symptoms emerge. Using an immuno-infrared sensor developed in Bochum, a research team is able to identify signs of Alzheimer’s disease in the blood up to 17 years before the first clinical symptoms appear. The sensor detects the misfolding of the protein biomarker amyloid-beta. As the disease progresses, this misfolding causes characteristic deposits in the brain, so-called plaques.
“Our goal is to determine the risk of developing Alzheimer’s dementia at a later stage with a simple blood test even before the toxic plaques can form in the brain, in order to ensure that a therapy can be initiated in time,” says Professor Klaus Gerwert, founding director of the Centre for Protein Diagnostics (PRODI) at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. His team cooperated for the study with a group at the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg (DKFZ) headed by Professor Hermann Brenner.
The team published the results obtained with the immuno-infrared sensor in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association on 19 July 2022. This study is supported by a comparative study published in the same journal on 2 March 2022, in which the researchers used complementary single-molecule array (SIMOA) technology.
Early detection of symptom-free people with a high risk of Alzheimer’s disease
The researchers analysed blood plasma from participants in the ESTHER study conducted in Saarland for potential Alzheimer’s biomarkers. The blood samples had been taken between 2000 and 2002 and then frozen. At that time, the test participants were between 50 and 75 years old and hadn’t yet been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. For the current study, 68 participants were selected who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease during the 17-year follow-up and compared with 240 control subjects without such a diagnosis. The team headed by Klaus Gerwert and Hermann Brenner aimed to find out whether signs of Alzheimer’s disease could already be found in the blood samples at the beginning of the study.
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