A new AI-powered blood test has been developed that can predict Parkinson’s seven years before the onset of symptoms.
The neurodegenerative disorder, affecting 10 million people worldwide, is typically not treated until symptoms appear; making the blood test developed by research teams at University College London and the University Medical Center Goettingen a real game-changer.
“We need to diagnose patients before they have developed the symptoms. We cannot regrow our brain cells and therefore we need to protect those that we have,” said Professor Kevin Mills, UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, and senior author of the new research. “At present we are shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted and we need to start experimental treatments before patients develop symptoms. Therefore, we set out to use state-of-the-art technology to find new and better biomarkers for Parkinson’s disease and develop them into a test that we can translate into any large NHS laboratory. With sufficient funding, we hope that this may be possible within two years.”
Prevention
The breakthrough, which harnesses machine learning to identify certain biomarkers, could make it possible to prevent some people from ever getting Parkinson’s.
“By determining 8 proteins in the blood, we can identify potential Parkinson’s patients several years in advance. This means that drug therapies could potentially be given at an earlier stage, which could possibly slow down disease progression or even prevent it from occurring,” said Dr Michael Bartl from Goettingen.
The research “represents a major step forward in the search for a definitive and patient friendly diagnostic test for Parkinson’s” says Professor David Dexter, director of research at Parkinson’s UK, who added that “finding biological markers that can be identified and measured in the blood is much less invasive than a lumbar puncture”.
The research was published this week in Nature Communications.
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