Biomarkers to Advance Drug Development for Alzheimer‘s Disease

Abstract

There is a sense of excitement and anticipation that drugs based on the β-amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer‘s disease (AD) may significantly reduce progression of the disease. However, without appropriate biomarkers, potentially effective drugs may actually fail to demonstrate efficacy owing to difficulties in choosing a proper dose and difficulty in detecting improved clinical outcomes in short trials. Both hypothesis- and discovery-based approaches, including high-throughput proteomic profiling, should be applied for discovery of biomarkers to better understand the action of novel therapies on their targets and on the molecular pathology of the disease. It is also imperative to identify antecedent markers, without which, patients with AD will be prescribed drugs that may prolong a life of slowly progressing dementia. Where we look for novel AD biomarkers and how we discover them is the subject of this perspective.

Keywords: :

• Alzheimer‘s disease
• biomarkers
• cerebral spinal fluid
• diagnostics
• mass spectrometry
• neurodegeneration
• plasma
• proteomics