Alzheimer’s researchers team up

TRENTON, N.J. – A research institute devoted to Alzheimer’s and related diseases has teamed up with a major maker of diagnostic tests to speed development of what could be the first test to detect Alzheimer’s in its early stages.

If all goes well, the first commercial version of the test could be available in 12 to 18 months, possibly enabling patients to try to slow progression of the increasingly common disease, said Dr. Daniel Alkon, scientific director of the Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute.

“This may be a way of monitoring how effective a treatment is for Alzheimer’s disease” as well, through periodic retesting once scientists can develop a medicine to stop the mind-robbing disease, Alkon told the Associated Press on Tuesday.

Alkon’s institute, based at West Virginia University and affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, was to announce today a multimillion-dollar contract with Inverness Medical Innovations Inc. of Waltham, Mass. Inverness will fund development of the Alzheimer’s test and future improvements, including an eventual home version, for at least three years.

The test works by detecting abnormal function of a protein that has been shown to be involved in memory storage, Alkon said.

First, a small sample of cells is removed from a patient’s skin at a doctor’s office or testing center and shipped to the institute. There, scientists grow the skin cells in a glass dish and add a substance to stimulate an enzyme called PKC to make the protein combine with the element phosphorous inside the skin cells. If too much phosphorous ends up in the combination, then the patient has Alzheimer’s, Alkon said.

So far, the test has been tried on more than 300 patients at 15 hospitals, including 42 for whom the Alzheimer’s diagnosis was later confirmed by an autopsy showing the disease’s signature pattern of brain damage.

The test was 98 percent accurate on the autopsied patients. But of those, only 11 had early Alzheimer’s, as very few people die within three or four years of the disease starting. Alkon hopes to test thousands more patients before his diagnostic test is marketed.

Dr. Ralph Nixon, vice chairman of the Alzheimer’s Association’s medical and scientific advisory council, said the institute’s test needs more evaluation, particularly among patients with early symptoms, to determine its accuracy.