Plasma Cell-Free RNA as Noninvasive Biomarker for Parkinson's Disease

Abstract

Parkinson disease (PD) is the most common neurodegenerative disorder, after Alzheimer disease (AD). Many attempts have been made to find a good biomarker, including alpha-synuclein protein levels in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Cellfree nucleic acids-based diagnostic tests have revolutionized prenatal screening. They have also been investigated in cancer and fetal development among other traits, including neurodegenerative diseases. We have successfully developed a preliminary predictive model for AD using cell-free plasma RNA sequencing (cfRNASeq) and machine learning techniques. We used an exploratory dataset (10 AD cases and 10 controls) to train a predictive model. We obtained an area under the ROC (AUC) of 0.84 in an independent replication dataset (10 independent AD cases and 10 controls). Moreover, this model provided similar accuracy (AUC=0.86) when tested in four preclinical AD. Using state-of-art deep neural network approaches, the accuracy increased up to 0.94. Overall, these results indicate that we can identify individuals that will progress to dementia. We think this technique can be applied to PD to generate disease-specific predictive model. We hypothesize that there are detectable changes in the plasma free nucleic acid composition due to PD pathogenesis, even in early stages. We will use bioinformatics tools to construct a predictive model for PD, leveraging longitudinal plasma data that will allow the modeling of plasma cfRNA composition changes over the curse of the disease, thus maximizing the power of selecting informative transcripts to construct the predictive model.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2024
Accession Number
AD1225476

Entities

People

  • Laura Ibanez

Organizations

  • Washington University in St. Louis

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Biology

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Molecular Genetics
  • Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Cognitive Aging in the Guam and Border Populations Affected by Alzheimer's Disease and Tau-Associated Dementias.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Neural Networks
  • Biotechnology