A novel method to detect early AD from circulating blood of AD patients

 
   Lead Investigator:    Shigeki Tsutsui
   Institution      :    University of Calgary
   E-Mail           :    stsutsui@ucalgary.ca
   Proposal ID      :    774



   Proposal Description:
   The primary purpose of my research is to develop a novel method to detect early   Alzheimer???s disease from the circulating blood of AD patients. The project      uses novel spectroscopic techniques and employs protein                           conformationally-sensitive molecular probes (currently using K114) for specific   identification of misfolded protein aggregates accumulated by circulating blood   PBMC (presented in AAIC 2016). We are currently targeting  3 groups of human      subjects: AD, MCI and non-AD-controls, and collecting the PBMC from the           Cognitive Neurosciences Clinic at Foothills Medical Centre, University of         Calgary (PI: Dr. Eric Smith), however, we do not have any definitively            diagnosed subjects with PBMC samples to validate our method. My collaborator,     Dr. Peter Stys recently set up the collaboration with Dr. Zetterberg              (University of Gothenburg, Sweden) to test CSF-ELISA in parallel with our new     assay, but so far, we have only very few samples tested with CSF-ELISA.           Therefore, we are looking for some definitively diagnosed AD subjects, even       they are very small number, to validate our new assay.