Patients with Alzheimer’s disease, first complain of mild memory impairment, an intermediate state between normal cognitive aging and dementia, which progresses to increased degree of memory impairment: mild, moderate and severe dementia. An effective therapeutic treatment of Alzheimer needs to be initiated at the early stages. It is an urgent requirement in diagnostic field to develop a rapid, non-invasive, non-costly test that would enable detecting the disease at its early stages to help implementing preventive strategies before the disease worsening. Such a test will also support successful clinical trial outcomes on novel therapeutic candidates.

Our research has shown the potential of combination of circulating blood non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) as biomarker signature for the diagnosis of early Alzheimer.

The present MemoryLINC project will focus on the analytical validation of the test based on measurements of this combination of circulating blood ncRNAs and on the proof-of-performance of the test to detect early Alzheimer on a larger number of samples from well-designed prospective clinical studies (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02973971; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03030586).

We expect that the MemoryLINC project will rapidly deliver an in-vitro diagnostic test suitable as an accurate non-invasive tool for early detection of Alzheimer and will have a strong impact on the quality of life of patients and a significant impact on the healthcare system and economy.