Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects

Currently 1 out of 11 Canadians suffers from some form of dementia. Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the leading form of dementia. An AD diagnosis can only be made through a lengthy and expensive process involving in the systematic elimination of other possible causes of cognitive impairment. While diagnostic accuracy of AD can be 90%, it is often made in the later disease stages where irreversible brain damage has already occurred. There is no cure for AD. Developing drugs for treating the disease is hindered by the lack of definitive chemical biomarkers that can be used for monitoring the disease progression, particularly in the earlier stages of AD. Thus, finding sensitive biomarkers for the early diagnosis or detection of AD is critical for managing and treating this devastating disease.While several proteins have been proposed as potential AD biomarkers, none has shown good specificity or sensitivity in clinical applications. The objective of this project is to apply newly developed mass spectrometry-based quantitative metabolomic techniques to search for small molecule biomarkers of AD. Our hypothesis is that in the early stages of AD, certain metabolic changes must be occurring in the brain and that by monitoring one or more key metabolites involved in these metabolic processes it may be possible to diagnose early-stage AD. To increase the likelihood of discovering specific AD biomarkers, we propose to apply state-of-the-art tools to comprehensively profile the metabolomes of urine, blood and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from AD patients. We will work with DynaLIFE Inc., a clinical diagnosis laboratory in Edmonton, toextent this study to validate the sensitivity and specificity of these biomarkers for diagnosis of AD. The anticipated results from this research include (1) verified (and validated in a small scale study) biomarkers for the early diagnosis of AD and (2) robust and inexpensive analytical methods for detecting these biomarkers. We believe that, if successful, this work could transform the management and treatment of AD and produce significant benefits to Canadians and the Canadian health care system.