A research team from National Chung Hsing University and Taichung Veterans General Hospital has made a significant stride in Alzheimer’s disease detection, unveiling a nanobrush-based electronic device that can identify the disease within an impressive 2-minute timeframe. This breakthrough holds immense promise for aiding physicians in early diagnosis and timely intervention.
In a recent press release, the collaborative effort led by Associate Professor Shu-Ping Lin from the Institute of Biomedical Engineering in the College of Engineering at National Chung Hsing University and Associate Professor Wei-Ju Lee from the School of Medicine, National Chung Hsing University, and Director of the Dementia Center at Taichung Veterans General Hospital, was highlighted. The team’s groundbreaking findings were published in the renowned international journal “ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces” in November.
Wei-Ju Lee shed light on the existing diagnostic tools for Alzheimer’s disease, which include traditional methods such as clinical history assessments, neuropsychological tests, and structural brain imaging. He emphasized the recent inclusion of positron emission tomography scans and biomarker tests in cerebrospinal fluid as essential diagnostic criteria.
Lee noted the drawbacks of current methods, citing the radiation and high costs associated with positron emission tomography scans and the invasive nature of obtaining cerebrospinal fluid through lumbar punctures for biomarker testing. He underscored the team’s pursuit of a more practical diagnostic approach involving the direct detection of brain-related biomarkers from peripheral blood.
Shu-Ping Lin emphasized the significance of the neurofilament light chain (NFL) concentration as a key indicator of neurodegeneration and damage in Alzheimer’s and related conditions. Traditional testing methods take several hours for results, with ELISA results from peripheral blood showing elevated NFL concentrations in Alzheimer’s patients.
The team’s innovative solution involves an electronic sensing component featuring a nanobrush structure capable of swiftly detecting NFL proteins and NFL-containing brain extracellular vesicles in blood samples. This design amplifies the surface area, facilitating the rapid amplification of electrical signals without the need for labeling. The result is a highly sensitive detector that significantly reduces testing time to an impressive 2 minutes. This development marks a crucial step toward more efficient and accessible Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis.
For more details, please go to https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsami.3c12766