Summary: Veravas and Phanes Biotech are collaborating to create a blood test using VeraBIND technology to detect Alzheimer’s tau pathology early, making diagnosis more accessible and affordable.

Takeaways:

  1. The new blood test aims to detect active Alzheimer’s disease by measuring the interaction between hyperphosphorylated tau and normal tau, markers linked to AD progression.
  2. Current tau PET imaging for Alzheimer’s diagnosis is costly and inaccessible to many; this test offers an affordable, early-stage diagnostic alternative.
  3. Clinical validation is underway, with Veravas planning to launch the test as a laboratory-developed solution to aid clinicians and researchers in Alzheimer’s diagnostics and treatment.

Veravas, a clinical diagnostics solutions provider, announced a collaboration with Phanes Biotech to co-develop a blood-based Alzheimer’s disease (AD) tau pathology test. Phanes Biotech is an early-stage biotech company focused on treatments for neurodegenerative diseases.

Developing a New Alzheimer’s Disease Test

The companies are codeveloping a test that leverages Veravas’ proprietary VeraBIND technology with Phanes’ biological intellectual property on tau pathology to detect active disease by studying measurable binding activity occurring in the brain between hyperphosphorylated tau (HPT) and normal tau (nTau), which is a hallmark of AD.

“Scientific discovery and therapeutic development in Alzheimer’s disease are surging, offering clinicians viable new opportunities to intervene early, potentially slow Alzheimer’s disease progression, and improve quality of life for patients. However, innovation in diagnostic testing to detect AD has lagged behind therapeutic development by continuing to rely on expensive and often inaccessible PET imaging tests and first-generation biomarker-based assays capable of detecting indicators of AD, but not detecting or measuring disease pathology,” says Khalid Iqbal, PhD, chief scientific officer and co-founder of Phanes Biotech. “The combination of Veravas’ VeraBIND platform with Phanes’ proprietary tau pathology insights offers a compelling and promising vehicle for a diagnostic that provides clinicians with a clear positive or negative result on whether a patient has AD, and makes diagnoses accessible, affordable, and available early in disease progression when treatment is most likely to be effective.”

New diagnostic solutions are desperately needed to identify AD at early stages when intervention is still possible. While nearly seven million Americans have been diagnosed with AD, an estimated 92% of cases of mild cognitive impairment, an early stage of memory and cognitive loss frequently associated with AD, remain undiagnosed.(1)

Further reading

Veravas Launches VeraBIND Technology for Ultra-Sensitive Assays

Tau pathology, or the buildup of neurofibrillary tangles composed of tau protein, is considered the best diagnostic and prognostic marker for Alzheimer’s disease, as it is strongly predictive of disease progression and future cognitive decline.(2) Tau PET imaging is currently the only diagnostic method for detecting tau pathology to definitively diagnose AD. However, high costs and long wait times for tests make tau PET imaging impractical for many patients.(3)

“Our technology has the potential to eliminate the uncertainties and accessibility hurdles of current Alzheimer’s disease diagnostics for the benefit of clinicians diagnosing and treating AD, their patients, and researchers conducting clinical trials,” says Josh Soldo, chief scientific officer of Veravas. “We look forward to working with researchers to complete clinical validation of this test and to commercially launching a laboratory-developed test leveraging this technology.”

References:

  1. 2024 Alzheimer’s disease facts and figures. Alzheimers Dement. 2024 May;20(5):3708-3821. doi: 10.1002/alz.13809. Epub 2024 Apr 30. PMID: 38689398; PMCID: PMC11095490.
  2. Jack CR, et al. Revised criteria for diagnosis and staging of Alzheimer’s disease: Alzheimer’s
  3. Groot C, et al. Tau Positron Emission Tomography for Predicting Dementia in Individuals With Mild Cognitive Impairment. JAMA Neurol. 2024;81(8):845–856.