Israel Matzav

Israeli company develops blood test for Alzheimer's

This hits really close to home. So close, that if anyone out there reading this knows how I can get this blood test, please email me (email address on the right side of the page). My father HK"M and grandfather z"l both had Alzheimer's. Now, an Israeli company has developed a simple blood test to detect it early when it can still be treated.

“Today one of the main weaknesses in the Alzheimer’s area is that patients don’t find out until it’s too late,” says Ilya Budik, CEO of NeuroQuest, an Israeli company developing a novel blood test for early detection of the most common cause of dementia worldwide.

“There are many new therapies under development, and the most successful trials are showing the earlier a patient is treated, the better likelihood of responding to the treatment,” he says.
A portfolio company of the government-supported Misgav Venture Accelerator in northern Israel, NeuroQuest recently received $500,000 in a funding round led by the InterTech Group in South Carolina and the Maryland/Israel Trendlines Fund.

This half a million dollars will enable NeuroQuest to progress towards a validation clinical trial at four US medical centers, and to establish a US development center, possibly alongside its South Carolina partners.

Its first human trials in Israel showed NeuroQuest’s test — which is based on 20 years of research by Prof. Michal Schwartz of the Weizmann Institute of Science — to be 87 percent accurate with an 85% specificity rate in detecting Alzheimer’s and ALS, two common neurodegenerative diseases. With blood tests, Budik explains, anything over 70% is considered medically significant.

“That gave us proof of concept for Prof. Schwartz’s discovery that certain parts of the immune system are involved in protecting the central nervous system and also in healing it from neurodegenerative diseases or neural injury,” Budik tells ISRAEL21c.

Read the whole thing. 

Labels: Alzheimer's disease, biotech, Israeli high tech

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:45 PM