STTR Phase I: Saliva Screening Test for Alzheimer’s Disease

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project entails the development of a simple and affordable saliva-based test that will enable the detection of early Alzheimer's disease. Today, there is no single test that can determine if a person has Alzheimer's disease. Because the diagnosis is complex, invasive, and expensive, these tests are only performed once symptoms, such as memory loss, begin to manifest. These symptoms of Alzheimer's disease only become apparent once the disease has already cause significant damage to the brain. The proposed test will be widely accessible and detect the disease before symptoms arise, enabling the patient to start active prevention strategies and even therapies to preserve brain health. As the American population ages — nearly 1 in 4 Americans will be 65 years of age or older by 2060 — Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias are becoming a great challenge for health and social care. As part of a broad approach to prevention, this technology can potentially extend early Alzheimer’s care to millions of Americans, allowing interventions, monitoring, and treatment initiation years earlier than what is currently possible. This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project is applying sophisticated chemical analysis methods to develop a novel test to detect signs of early Alzheimer’s disease using a person’s saliva. Diseases can cause changes in the biochemical composition of body fluids such as blood or saliva. Using a modern, highly sensitive type of spectroscopy based on light scattering, and combining it with advanced statistical approaches (i.e., machine learning), this project is developing a method that can reliably detect biochemical changes in saliva specific to Alzheimer’s disease. This project aims to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach by showing its ability to distinguish saliva donated by healthy individuals from saliva collected from Alzheimer's patients at both mild and moderate stages of the disease. The project will also investigate whether known biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease are being identified by this method and develop statistical approaches to interpret spectroscopic data. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.