bengaluru a costeffective easytouse sensor platform to facilitate earlierstage diagnosis of alzheimers disease ad is being developed by a research group at the centre for incubation innovation research and consultancy ciirc jyothy institute of technology bengalurualzheimers is an ageassociated irreversible progressive neurodegenerative disorder which eventually destroys memory and cognition skills of patients this disorder affects at least 35 million people globally and it is predicted that one in 85 people will be affected by 2050current diagnostic procedures are difficult and made in an advanced stage of alzheimers therefore it is clinically important to find accurate biomarkers by new noninvasive methods that enable early diagnosis and help in monitoring biochemical effects of the treatments ms santosh whos leading the ciirc group saidalthough cerebrospinal fluid csf extracted through lumbar puncture is the most reliable source to check alzheimers at present considering the difficulty involved in csfcollection procedures other body fluids such as urine saliva and in particular blood are being explored for new biomarkers in addition to the already known peptides and proteins however the presence of adrelated biomarkers in other bodily fluids are several times lower than in csf besides high cost of imaging technologies such as mri and pet scan and their limited accessibility calls for the development of a simple fast and inexpensive procedure santosh said adding we are using a combination of preanalytical techniques and a sensitive electrochemical sensor for early diagnosis of alzheimersthe project is being funded under the red biotechnology programme of the indofrench centre for the promotion of advanced research ifcpar santosh has collaborated with french academic partner prof sylvain lehmann at chu montpellier and industrial partners dr shushil choubey of transintegra healthcare private ltd and bruno filoche of spottolab from india and france respectively the preanalytical solution adopts a process called dried matrix spot dms or dried blood spot dbs which represents a way to stabilize biological fluids on a specific cellulose membrane when biological fluids are dried on the dms they can be sent by post as this process inactivates pathogens santosh said