Alzheimer’s Disease
Why in News?
- On 26 August 2026, scientists at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bengaluru, developed ADxFluor, a smartphone-enabled platform for detecting amyloid-β (Aβ), a key biomarker associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
- The platform uses a fluorescent probe called TZ-48. When TZ-48 interacts with Aβ, its fluorescence intensity and lifetime change, and these signals can be captured and quantified through a smartphone-based system.
- Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder and the most common cause of dementia.
- It primarily affects memory, thinking, reasoning and behaviour, progressively impairing a person's ability to perform daily activities.
- It is associated mainly with the abnormal accumulation of amyloid-β plaques outside neurons and tau protein tangles inside neurons.
- Amyloid-β is a protein fragment that can aggregate in the brain to form amyloid plaques.
- These plaques are one of the characteristic pathological features of Alzheimer’s disease.
- Detecting Aβ can therefore help identify Alzheimer’s-related pathology at an earlier stage, potentially before severe cognitive symptoms develop.
- Research published in Nature Medicine has highlighted circular RNAs (circRNAs) in blood as potential biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease.
- A model based on 34 Alzheimer’s-associated circular RNAs showed promising performance compared with established biomarkers such as pTau217 and amyloid PET, although larger-scale validation is still required.
