Israeli scientists have developed new technology to monitor Alzheimer’s disease

Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have created a method to accurately measure protein accumulations in Alzheimer’s disease, allowing them to monitor the progression of the disease and test drugs.

Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases are associated with abnormal accumulations of the protein Tau in the brain. These clumps (amyloid fibrils) grow and change over time, and their development reflects the progression of the disease. The size of these clusters in principle allows one to track the progression of the disease, but until now it has been extremely difficult to measure them, especially in the very small concentrations that are typical for biological samples.

Scientists proposed a new technology, called FibrilPaint, and developed the FibrilRuler test, which allows measuring the length of Tau protein fibers in solution at ultra-low concentrations. The results were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The basis of the new method is a short protein molecule (peptide) of 22 amino acids. It acts as a fluorescent marker for Tau protein fibers. The peptide binds to fibers and illuminates pathogenic structures. The peptide works with Tau fibers in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases, and reliably recognizes disease-causing clusters.

“The length of Tau fibrils is not just a detail, it is a key parameter of the pathological process,” explains co-author Professor Assaf Friedler.

The technology makes it possible to dynamically monitor the growth and fragmentation of disease-causing fibers, allows testing the effectiveness of drugs and, in the future, will help create diagnostic tools for monitoring dementia based on the size of fibers in the cerebrospinal fluid of patients.