The Pasqual Maragall Foundation's “What we never knew about Alzheimer's” campaign has managed to raise a total of €283,051. This collection has been possible thanks to the charitable donations of individuals and companies, exceeding the initial goal of raising €250,000 and demonstrating, once again, the great concern of the population to find a cure for Alzheimer's.
The money raised will go to the research project promoted by the Pasqual Maragall Foundation's research centre, the Barcelonaßeta Brain Research Center (BBRC), with the aim of examining, using highly innovative technology, the evolution of five biomarkers that reflect the pathologies related to Alzheimer's and neurodegeneration processes in the blood, in samples that have been stored for 10 years.
The Pasqual Maragall Foundation currently has this technology thanks to its pioneering laboratory, equipped with the most cutting-edge machinery and a scientific team led by Dr. Marta del Campo, director of the Fluid Biomarkers Platform at the BBRC, and Dr. Marc Suárez-Calvet, head of the Fluid Biomarkers and Translational Neurology Group at the BBRC. “We are promoting one of the first studies to analyse the evolution of biomarkers in blood and, therefore, a unique opportunity to predict changes before the appearance of clinical signs in a very large sample,” explains Dr. del Campo.
The research team will now be able to carry out a total of 10,000 analyses, from 4,000 blood samples, from more than 2,700 participants, which will allow them to take a key step in the early detection of Alzheimer's. In this sense, "the effort to obtain and preserve samples in the past will allow us to study longitudinal changes now and in the future, that is, changes over time in participants who have been in different phases of the study," says Dr. del Campo.
Currently, research into early detection of Alzheimer's is still being done late, when there are already obvious symptoms, and after invasive and expensive tests. Therefore, these new analyses will allow us to predict changes in the brain before the onset of symptoms and better analyse a person's risk of developing the disease in the future. Detecting the disease in time, through a blood test, "will also allow us to test new drugs and improve the chances of success of treatments aimed at stopping Alzheimer's in its earliest stages," concludes Dr. del Campo.
