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Clinical Neuroproteomics of Neurodegenerative Diseases

Final Report Summary - CNEUPRO (Clinical Neuroproteomics of Neurodegenerative Diseases)

Alzheimer's dementia (AD) is one of the most common brain diseases in the elderly. Dementias pose a major health problem in European countries, with currently 5.7 million affected dementia patients in the EU-25. Currently no curative therapies are available for these dementias, however, first disease-modifying treatment strategies like Abeta-immunisation have entered clinical trials. These novel treatments will be most effective if they are offered at a very early dementia stage. However, the reliable clinical differential diagnosis of very early dementia stages is not satisfactory. Here, recent research has clearly demonstrated that multiparametric Neurochemical dementia diagnostics (NDD) in Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) does improve the early and differential diagnosis of dementias.

CNEUPRO applied advanced proteomic tools to discover novel neurochemical dementia markers (biomarkers) in blood and CSF for the improved early and possibly predictive diagnosis of AD. A predictive dementia diagnosis will support the most effective use of forthcoming preventive therapeutic strategies. Their initiative established European SOPs for current Neurochemical dementia diagnostics (NDD) and established NDD reference centres in Portugal and Hungary.

In the biomarker discovery workflows, a list of 30 biomarker candidates was found in both datasets simultaneously. As this simultaneous detection in two separate samples can be seen as a first step of validation, the involved contractors plan to file these 30 biomarker candidate as a patent.

The potential use of this finding is its use as a diagnostic test for AD. Therefore further validation studies and eventually the construction of single ELI-SAs will be necessary. Although the competence to do these additional validation experiments lies within the consortium, the lack of time and financial resources hindered CNEUPRO to do them. Therefore, before filing the patent, the consortium is actually looking for potential investors who might be interested in the patent and who would take charge of the further validation efforts.