Development of a New Antibody-Based Diagnostic Approach for the Earlier Diagnosis and Treatment of AlzheimerTMs Disease ΠYoung Scientists Journal

Current diagnostic approaches to neurodegenerative diseases are often flawed as they are often invasive and cannot effectively diagnose early-onset dementia. Antibody-based therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases are very promising but often lack specificity to certain biomarkers and require invasive methods of administration such as a lumbar puncture. In this study I report a novel quantum-dot (QD) conjugated bispecific-antibody (BsAb) diagnosis system designed for Alzheimer’s disease. This structure is easy to synthesize and displays specificity to oligomeric amyloid-beta (A?), which is often present before Alzheimer’s symptoms starts to manifest. The bispecific antibody also binds with a weak affinity to transferrin receptors – thus potentially allowing it to cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB) via receptor-mediated transcytosis and reducing the necessity for extremelyinvasive means of administration such as a lumbar puncture. The CdTe/ZnS QDs conjugated to the BsAb have multimodal, non-invasive MRI and fNIR imaging capabilities and also displayed allow cytotoxicity to neuronal cells. The synthesized nanoparticles composed of CdTe/ZnS with a Gd-DOTA doped silica shell also displayed therapeutic properties by immobilizing the toxic oligomeric A? and increasing neuronal viability. These novel BsAb-QD structures display promising diagnostic and therapeutic properties and represent an important evolution in neurodegenerative drug design. I synthesized a novel nanoparticle-bound antibody for the earlier diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease which proves to be less invasive and more accurate in comparison to existing tests of its kind.