THERAD - Microwave Theranostics for Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a progressive degenerative pathology that affects millions of people worldwide, and it is expected that by the 2050 this number will triple. Due to the population aging, this phenomenon will grow, bringing increasingly high health, family and social costs for the healthcare of the involved patients. The progression of the disease causes the damage of the healthy brain cells leading to different disabling effects: apathy, depression, loss of the short-term memory, difficulties in communication, behavioral changes and confusion, but also problems in swallowing and walking. Unfortunately, these symptoms appear years after the beginning of AD, even if the first biological changes due to the pathology are detectable before the symptoms. Nowadays, the techniques for the diagnosis of AD involve the evaluation of the presence of specific biomarkers via blood samples, which is not enough for diagnosis, lumbar puncture with the extraction of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), or by using positron emission tomography (PET) or Magnetic Resonance imaging (MRI). These methods are not appropriate for large scale screening of seemingly healthy patients since the lumbar puncture is invasive, and PET and MRI are limited by availability and cost: the medical world needs new, more accessible, and low-cost technologies able to evaluate the presence of AD biomarkers when the disease is at an early stage via regular screening campaigns. At the same time, since most of the treatments are symptomatic therapies which should be administered in early disease course to be most effective, we need non-invasive, possibly non-pharmacological alternative to the current AD treatments. The aim of this project is to develop a novel theranostic device based on microwave (MW) able to detect the presence of the disease in its early stage and contrasting the cell damage in a non-invasive and non-pharmacological way. It has been studied that, during the disease, there is a progressive accumulation of the Ab and tau proteins in the CSF, which causes a change in its dielectric properties: higher is the proteins accumulation, lower will be the CSF relative permittivity. This change can be detected non-invasively via MW signal considering the CSF in the subarachnoid region.

This research is supported by the project “THERAD-Microwave Theranostics for Alzheimer’s Disease” funded by Compagnia di San Paolo.