In light of World Alzheimer’s Month, Kim Henriksen, our Director of Endocrinology and CNS, is introducing some of the work that we have done within the field of Alzheimer’s Disease.
As there is a large, unmet need for blood-based biomarkers that select subjects who are most likely to respond to therapy, we are developing Tau-C, an assay that allows for the early detection of neuron loss before the onset of symptoms.
We are looking for subjects who most likely will respond to therapy. To do this, we have been looking into protease-generated fragments of the neuron-specific protein Tau. We have done this for two reasons.
1) They are small and enter the bloodstream.
2) Protease-generated fragments contain pathologically relevant information about the disease.
As an example, take our Tau-C assay. In this assay, we use an antibody specifically detecting a caspase-3 generated fragment of Tau. Having established the assay, we proceeded to measure in blood samples from subjects with brain injury, as brain injury is known to cause neuronal loss and release of fragments into the circulation,
Already 24 hours after the injury, the levels of Tau-C in circulation are highly elevated, thereby confirming the relationship to neuronal loss.
More importantly, when we assessed the levels of Tau-C in a large cohort of elderly subjects, we found that the levels of Tau-C measured at baseline of the study were indicative of a future diagnosis of dementia.
These findings strongly support that Tau-C can be used to identify those subjects losing neurons before their symptoms have manifested, and therefore at the timepoint where therapy is most likely to succeed.
Finally, we are now looking into fragments of other neuronal proteins to hopefully, in the near future, be able to segregate different dementia forms more carefully than we can at present.
We look forward to analyzing your samples!
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