We will develop an electronic technology to detect fibrillar aggregates, which are characteristic of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. Our preliminary results (detection of 100 protein molecules) indicate that the enhanced sensitivity of our technology could enable the detection of the earliest biochemical evidence of a neurodegenerative disease, like Alzheimer's disease. This would allow the non-invasive screening of patients by analyzing bodily fluids for characteristic fibrils and provide a quantitative method for assessing the efficacy of drugs in clinical trials. The technology can readily be extended to a MEMS (microelectronic and mechanical system) based array assay to multiplex the screening of drugs to inhibit fibril formation. The technology will also enable the rapid screening of nested sets of peptides to identify sequences that participate in fibril formation. We have chosen Alzheimer's disease as our model system to develop and test the technology because it is an important biological problem, fibril formation of beta-amyloid variants has been well characterized in vitro and a likely target for therapeutic intervention, the protofibril, has been identified. However, the technology can be used as a general tool for detecting any protein-protein, antibody-protein or drug-protein interaction in a high-throughput system.
The rapid electronic detection of fibrillar aggregates characteristic of neurodegenerative diseases will allow for the commercial development of tests to screen pre-symptomatic patients for disease, to objectively monitor response to therapy in symptomatic patients and to screen for drugs that block fibril formation or their incorporation into aggregates.
