I-Corps: Early Stage Diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to provide a biological measure of Parkinsons disease (PD) which is extremely valuable in determining treatment strategies for PD patients and in drug development against PD. PD is the second most common neurodegenerative disease in the United States with treatment costs that exceeded $14.4 billion in 2010 and projected to double by 2040. Effective treatment of PD requires reliable early diagnosis of PD, however no objective test for definitive diagnosis of PD currently exists. Current diagnosis is based on outward symptoms like tremors, slow movement, rigid muscle, brain imaging and usually requires multiple visits with neurology specialists to avoid misdiagnosis. In fact, a 2013 study determined that the direct cost of diagnosis for a new PD patient on average amounts to $7,322 and with 60,000 new diagnosis of PD made every year in US, the market of PD diagnosis is estimated to be a minimum $0.4 billion. A new diagnostic approach for early stage of Parkinson's disease (PD) will have a tremendous impact on the prevention and treatment of PD by providing a stratification strategy of patients and increase the success in clinical trial of PD treatment. This I-Corps project is based on an understanding of the role of protein homeostasis in the cell and developing tools and techniques to decipher these pathways. PD is a neurological disease with the key hallmark of large deposits of Lewy bodies, an amalgam of aggregated proteins, in the affected motor neurons. Literature reports have identified certain biomarkers in Lewy bodies that have unique signature of post-translational modification which can cross the blood brain barrier. This project leverages techniques that identify signatures on the biomarker in PD blood samples and utilize tools that recombinantly generate biomarkers and develop antibodies against them, which will allow development of a test kit for early detection of PD non-invasively.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.