Northbrook Firm’s Device Can Test Blood for Certain Diseases

Feb. 2–Equipment to test blood for signs of heart disease, cancer and perhaps Alzheimer’s disease, will be marketed by a Northbrook firm by the end of 2005.

Using techniques made possible by nanotechnology, which allow researchers to detect key markers for disease at very low concentrations, Nanosphere Inc. is developing an automated process to read genetic materials much like a barcode scans prices.

“Automation is very important because it enables you to do more experiments in a given window of time,” said William Moffitt, the firm’s chief executive.

The technology is designed to find proteins that could indicate disease. The proteins may be the cause of the illness or a byproduct of the disease. Either way, detection gives researchers a way to diagnose illness at early stage.

It also lets them determine if treatments are helping to fight a disease.

One early application for Nanosphere’s technology may be to determine when a person has heart disease before a heart attack occurs, Moffitt said.

“Researches know that the protein troponin is a marker for heart attacks,” he said. “At very low levels, it can indicate when someone has heart disease and monitoring it can help in assessing how quickly the disease is progressing.”

Recent research by Chad Mirkin, a chemistry professor at Northwestern University, suggests the technology may also help doctors diagnose Alzheimer’s disease in its earliest stage.

“These things have been flying below the radar because we just cannot detect them,” he said.

The researchers reported they can detect a protein marker called ADDL in the cerebral spinal fluid of patients, suggesting an early phase of Alzheimer’s. Previously, ADDL was found in brain tissue and many researchers believe it plays a role in the dementia associated with Alzheimer’s.

Researchers at Merck & Co. are working to develop antibodies that would disable ADDL as a strategy to reverse Alzheimer’s.

Mirkin said the ability to detect ADDL at very low levels will help speed the research and may eventually help doctors diagnose and the treat the disease.

William Klein, of Northwestern’s department of neurobiology and physiology, said that the next task is to determine if ADDL can be detected circulating in the blood of Alzheimer patients.

“If that’s the case, you might one day get a test for ADDL annually when you have a physical,” Klein said.

Moffitt said that his company’s strategy is to market its technology first to researchers. As researchers discover more and more protein markers that are tied to disease, the equipment can then be used in hospital labs or even doctors’ offices to help diagnose diseases.

The firm expects to start selling equipment to be used for disease detection sometime next year, he said.

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