NEURO-APTA-MARK

A key bottleneck in drug development for neurodegenerative diseases (Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, FTD) is the lack of accessible, holistic, and scalable molecular tools supporting patient stratification, disease staging and response monitoring in trials of new therapies.

Current proteomics falls short in translation: most technologies are blind to the wide proteoform diversity (tau species, α-synuclein truncations, TDP-43 fragments), and mass spectrometry is too complex to scale for multi-site clinical cohorts.

We propose to implement the Aptamarker platform in a pan-European network of clinical centres, academics and therapy developers, to predict or read therapy responses and de-risk go/no-go decisions for disease-modifying treatments.

The Aptamarker platform applies 268 million DNA aptamer probes to every sample, enabling agnostic proteoform detection from plasma, serum, CSF, single cells or other biofluids, with NGS readout and ML-driven interpretation. Its strengths make it the tool of choice for therapy development across the preclinical-to-clinical workflow: easy adoption (microlitre volumes, standard NGS equipment, competitive cost per sample); and durable new assets as discovered proteoform-specific probes can become custom qPCR or NGS assays, including companion and pharmacodynamic biomarkers for new therapies.

The project will build models for patient stratification and treatment-response prediction, validates them prospectively in interventional cohorts, and converts them into deployable assays — supporting the development-selection-implementation of new precision and personalized therapies.