According to the Department of Science and Technology of India, researchers at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research have invented a platform using a smartphone which is claimed to detect a key marker of Alzheimer’s faster, cheaper and more accessibly.
The ADxFluor platform utilises a fluorescent molecule named TZ-48 in order to detect the protein amyloid-beta, which is responsible for Alzheimer’s disease. Fluorescent signals which occur due to changes are processed and quantified by an app on a smartphone. The ADxFluor system then measures quantities of amyloid-beta present in serum.
It has been pointed out by the researchers that TZ-48 has the capability of crossing the blood-brain barrier and has been successfully used for the detection of amyloid-beta plaques in genetically altered mice, differentiating between normal and Alzheimer’s mice sera.
Dr Thimmaiah Govindaraju was the lead of the study, which involved Krithi K. Bhagavath and Madhu Ramesh as researchers and was published in the June edition of ACS Chemical Neuroscience.
Adding smartphone technology to the detection probe will increase its usefulness; it could be a cheaper portable device that can detect and distinguish the biomarker better and will act as screening for the disease. Currently, the data has research-level information.
