Developing a Blood-Based Biomarker Panel for Alzheimer's Disease

While much progress has been made over understanding Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathology and using neuroprotective strategies and some effort spent on brain imaging changes in AD we still lag far behind in developing reliable, sensitive, non-invasive and cost-effective diagnostic biomarkers which can be used before and during the course of a therapeutic intervention. There is substantial evidence to indicate that early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease coincide with specific protein changes in peripheral body fluids particularly blood and these changes subsequently also reflect aggravation of AD pathology during its time-course. Age related protein changes pose a major hurdle to identify and differentiate the specific AD biomarkers due to high prevalence of the disease in aged populations. We propose that investigating familial form of AD will be an innovative approach to identify and develop reliable blood-based biomarkers for this disease.

While much progress has been made over understanding Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathology and using neuroprotective strategies and some effort spent on brain imaging changes in AD we still lag far behind in developing reliable, sensitive, non-invasive and cost-effective diagnostic biomarkers which can be used before and during the course of a therapeutic intervention. There is substantial evidence to indicate that early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease coincide with specific protein changes in peripheral body fluids particularly blood and these changes subsequently also reflect aggravation of AD pathology during its time-course. Age related protein changes pose a major hurdle to identify and differentiate the specific AD biomarkers due to high prevalence of the disease in aged populations. We propose that investigating familial form of AD will be an innovative approach to identify and develop reliable blood-based biomarkers for this disease.