It may be near the goal of a blood test to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease. It would be a breakthrough, considering that today the standard clinical procedure involves an invasive sampling of cerebrospinal fluid at the lumbar level to detect abnormal levels of specific proteins.
The project SensApp, funded by the European Union in a very competitive tender, brings together several teams of scientists in Europe to collaborate on the development of a super-sensor, which will allow doctors to make a routine diagnosis through a simple blood test. The project will develop a super-sensor that will be able to recognize these proteins in human plasma through a simple blood test, with a sensitivity of less than 1 pg / mL, a value currently impossible to achieve with standard protocols.
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“The project brings together very diverse skills ranging from physics and engineering to biology and clinical sciences. Our goal is to implement a prototype that is capable of making the diagnosis quickly and non-invasively. This will radically change the perspectives of physicians. as it will be possible to study new experimental therapies in the initial stages of the disease, before the irreversible phase which usually coincides with the appearance of recognizable symptoms such as memory loss “, says the project coordinator, Dr. Simonetta Grilli.
In this phase of the project, the consortium’s activity is focusing on the implementation of the prototype, whose function is based on a completely new technology, tested for the first time by the Cnr team (Institute of Applied Sciences and Intelligent Systems) which coordinates the project and named it split-and-stack droplet (DSS). “In simple terms, we can say that we use an electric field to superimpose tiny droplets of plasma on top of each other to increase the fluorescence signal sent by the proteins.”
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“We have already successfully tested at Cnr the sensitivity of this technology for very small quantities (less than 1 pg / mL) in the case of model samples. The next challenge is to detect Alzheimer’s molecules with the same sensitivity in real plasma samples.” , says Simonetta Grilli.
The new technology developed by SensApp will also be usable in other fields of medicine where very diluted antibodies are sought in the early stages of the disease, for example in oncology, or for heart and stress-related diseases and covid.
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Next year, the project will enter a test phase and begin using the new automated units to analyze plasma samples for disease biomarkers. The ultimate goal will be to ensure a quick and non-invasive diagnosis through a simple blood test in a clinical analysis laboratory.
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