BYU professor Tim Jenkins and Ph.D. student Chad Pollard have found a way to detect markers for neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's, before symptoms present themselves.
This research started about four years ago with a single question while Pollard was Jenkins' undergrad student.
At the time, they were researching in the fertility field, trying to treat male infertility by identifying what sperm DNA look like.
Pollard came to Jenkins and asked if they could use that same technology to identify neurons in the blood. This began their research.
“We could detect really really clearly, just looking at blood cell DNA, who had Alzheimer's and who didn’t,” Jenkins said.
Alzheimer’s is a neurodegenerative disease caused by decaying neurons that die over time and cause the brain to shrink, according to the Mayo Clinic.
The destruction of these cells can cause memory failure, personality changes and problems carrying out daily tasks, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
When analyzing samples, Jenkins and Pollard saw no cell decay in their younger samples but found an alarmingly high percentage of dead neurons in blood samples taken from people sixty years and up.
“We saw that approximately 10% of the samples that we sequenced looked like they had dead neurons,” Jenkins said.
According to the Alzheimer’s Association, about 1 in 9 people age 65 and older in the U.S. have Alzheimer’s, with the percentage increasing with age.
The Alzheimer's Association also found that Alzheimer's disease was the fifth leading cause of death among individuals 65 and older in 2021.
Pollard took their initial research to BYU’s Student Innovator of the Year competition in 2022 and won. He used the prize money to further their research and start their own company: Renew Biotechnologies.
According to Jenkins and Pollard, the reason this research is so important is because it can detect who has Alzheimer’s, or any other neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and ALS, before symptoms even arise.
“They’re diseases that are active years — if not decades — before symptoms ever show up,” Pollard said.
Being able to find these diseases before symptoms arise would give a chance to apply treatment in time before it could become deadly.
“If we got a picture well before symptoms onset, individuals could likely take these therapeutics and extend their lifespan — and perhaps not even develop the symptoms we recognize with dementia,” Jenkins said.
The University of Kansas Alzheimer’s Research Center reached out to Jenkins and Pollard when they found out about their research. Dr. Ted Burns from The University of Kansas had blood samples from patients 12-15 years before they had Alzheimer’s symptoms and asked for a collaboration between the universities to further their research.
The team hopes their research can create a world where this is standard technology, used in all patients' lives.
“I believe that in the future we’ll have screening tests in your annual doctor's visit for brain health,” Jenkins said.
The idea is that when patients go in for a check-up, a brain scan looking for decaying neurons will be a routine test that is ran. If a patient does have decaying neurons, they can be given a treatment to stop the decaying before they are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or any other neurodegenerative disease.
“Being able to find that someone has a disease is only really valuable if you have a way of treating the disease,” Pollard said.
Pollard and Jenkins hope that this technology will soon become available to the public. They are still awaiting clinic approval but hope to start testing their technology on actual patients this fall.
“We’re really excited for later this year when we are able to actually test patients and get them on treatments and see it start changing lives,” Pollard said.
Pollard said he has seen his research spread positivity, making him more excited to further the research and make it readily available.
“It gives a lot of people hope,” Pollard said.
There are still a lot of questions surrounding the extent of the research, questions that cannot be answered until the research gets clinical approval to begin being tested on patients.
“As long as we detect it 3-5 years beforehand, you can treat it — but that’s one of the questions we’ll find out with the study,” Pollard said.