Amsterdam, NL, May 2, 2012 -- Anders Lönneborg, PhD, has been chosen as the recipient of the 2012 Alzheimer Award presented by the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease in recognition of his outstanding work on the detection of early Alzheimer's disease.
"My co-authors and I are extremely pleased to have been chosen by a distinguished group of peers as the recipients of this year's Journal of Alzheimer's Disease award for our work on the development of ADtect®, the 96-gene expression test for detection of early Alzheimer's disease," said Dr. Lönneborg, Research Director, DiaGenic, Oslo, Norway.
Each year the more than 500 Associate Editors of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease vote to select an outstanding article published the previous year to receive this prestigious award, which is made possible by support from IOS Press and Elan Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Lönneborg will be presented with the bronze Alzheimer Medal featuring the likeness of Alois Alzheimer. The winning paper is entitled, "A Novel Blood Test for the Early Detection of Alzheimer's Disease" (J Alzheimers Dis 23, 121-129, 2011), by A. Lönneborg et al.
The team behind the paper, led by Dr. Lönneborg, investigated the diagnostic value of a 96-gene expression array for detection of early AD. A disease classification algorithm was developed and was validated in two steps using an independent initial test set and another second test set. A similar accuracy (72%), sensitivity (72%) and specificity (71%) were achieved both in the initial analysis and in the two independent test sets. When compared with available CSF biomarker data high agreement (80%) was found.
"Although further studies are needed to confirm these findings, they suggest that the gene expression test using a convenient blood sample can aid the diagnosis of mild to moderate AD," adds Dr. Lönneborg.
Anders Lönneborg, PhD, received his degree in molecular plant physiology from the University of Umeå, Sweden in 1986. After a postdoctoral fellowship in molecular plant biology at Michigan State University under the mentorship of Prof. Chris Somerville, and working as Research Scientist at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and as Senior Scientist at the Norwegian Forest Research Institute, Dr. Lönneborg was acknowledged competence as professor in 1995. In 1998 he founded DiaGenic with Dr. Praveen Sharma, where he has served as Research Director since the company's inception and CEO from 2003-2007.
DiaGenic's focus has always been to develop blood-based tests based on gene expression to aid the diagnosis of important diseases, primarily neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. The company aims to develop companion diagnostics and biomarkers to aid the development of novel treatments for Alzheimer's disease.