HONG KONG (Dispatches) -- International researchers led by Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) have developed a simple but robust blood test from Chinese patient data for early detection and screening of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) with an accuracy level of over 96%.
The team led by Prof. Nancy IP, Vice-President for Research and Development at HKUST, has identified 19 out of the 429 plasma proteins associated with AD to form a biomarker panel representative of an “AD signature” in the blood. Based on this panel, the team has developed a scoring system that distinguishes AD patients from healthy people with more than 96% accuracy. This system can also differentiate among the early, intermediate, and late stages of AD, and can be used to monitor the progression of the disease over time. These exciting findings have led to the development of a high-performance, blood-based test for AD, and may also pave the way to novel therapeutic treatments for the disease.
The discovery was made using the proximity extension assay (PEA) -- a cutting-edge ultrasensitive and high-throughput protein measurement technology, to examine the levels of over 1,000 proteins in the plasma of AD patients in Hong Kong.