AD/PD 2026 | The development of a novel blood-based biomarker for early detection of Parkinson’s disease

So there is a major problem in identifying early biomarkers because what was not clear to me when I initially performed this study is to what extent people are anxious to know what’s coming. And now I’m getting emails like, I’m in Australia, but I’m coming to Israel because I need that test. So the test is now being discussed in the FDA, and we hope that it will be approved as a blood test for predicting the emergence of Parkinson’s disease. So it all started with a PhD student, Nimrodmadrer, who came to me and said, I found a repetitive motif. And I said, what do you mean you found a repetitive motif? And the guy says, what do you think I’ve been doing in 8200, which is the Israeli intelligence force? I was watching screens for three years, seeking repetitive motifs. So now I found a sequence like that. So, okay. So I said, okay, now find a test that is officially approved for identifying repetitive motifs, apply this sequence and come tell me and he did so now we had a repetitive motif test, what do you do with that? So we linked in to the Michael J. Fox website where they have a lot of samples from patients, like thousands of patients. And sure enough, we found this repetitive motif in all of the Parkinson’s disease patients and in many that came because of suspicion or family links or whatever. And we found that even two years before disease was confirmed. So then we wrote the paper, we sent it to Nature Aging. They were immediately interested, but they had a lot of critiques. So it took a year until the paper was officially accepted. But then it was, you know, full proof with a lot more of statistical tests and confirmation and when it appeared it created a big interest. We are proceeding with that test we are asking what does the repetitive motif bind, right today we know that RNA sequences also interact with proteins, and some of the proteins it interacts with might be important for Parkinson’s disease. So that’s the obvious next stage, and that’s what we’re doing right now. To begin with, it’s a blood test that can identify the disease or the risk of coming disease. And in our research, this is a note saying here is a potential way to look for what happens when disease starts. So we are looking for those agents, proteins or RNAs that announce that disease is coming. So we are proceeding based on this initial finding, that’s another PhD student that proceeds into testing to what extent this indeed reflects the coming disease and what is the pathway through which this signal activates things. The hope is that this would lead to early treatment. The main problem with the neurodegenerative diseases is when we note the symptoms, it’s too late to treat. What we need is an early piece of information that says now is the time to prevent the emergence of disease. And that’s how we structure our study.

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