Description
The NADINE project aims at the development of a diagnostic tool able to detect in blood as early as possible, and at a cost compatible with large scale screening, emerging neurodegenerative diseases (e.g. Alzheimer’s Disease), and thus aid in the selection of the best treatment. None of current methods is able to achieve such a differentiation. The project thus has an immense impact for health, quality of life and economy.
The NADINE project will involve radical innovations in microfluidics, nanoparticles, electrophoresis protein analyses, analytic chemistry and bioinformatics. It will develop and integrate new technologies towards a fully automated lab-on-chip system for the simultaneous quantitative analysis of a multiplicity of proteins, peptides and their variants, down to concentrations in the picomolar range directly from plasma. In particular, the system will, for the first time, combine in a single automated operation protein microarray and microchannel high resolution electrophoresis directly from clinical samples.
The project involves a multidisciplinary consortium of technology developers, three leading biomedical groups in clinical neuroscience for definition of specifications and end-user pre-clinical validation, three research-oriented SMEs in biotechnology, nanosensing and microfluidics and a pharmaceutical company.
The expected final result of NADINE is a prototype instrument and methods for the early differential diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases based on multimodal biomarkers signature.