Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) is a neurodegenerative disease predicted to be caused by prolonged exposure to repeated concussions. Recently, CTE has become somewhat of a hot topic because an increasing amount of American football players have been showing severe signs of mental instability prior to their CTE diagnosis. Unfortunately, the only way to accurately diagnose CTE, is to identify a significant amount of phosphorylated Tau within neurons and astrocytes surrounding small blood vessels within the cerebral cortex during a post-mortem autopsy. However, if researchers could identify an early stage marker of CTE, athletes of all kinds could be saved from the severe deleterious affects CTE has on the mind.
In order to identify a possible biomarker of CTE, researchers from the Boston University Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and CTE Center undertook an ELISA based analysis of levels of phosphorylated Tau, along with the chemokine CCL11 in brain samples from deceased football players who had confirmed CTE, AD patients, and deceased individuals who had no signs of AD or CTE. CCL11 was chosen due to its varying expression in numerous types of neurodegenerative diseases such as AD, ALS, Huntington's, and multiple sclerosis. CCL11 has also been shown to be able to cross the blood brain barrier as well as become endogenously expressed within multiple different cell types of the brain in response to neuro-inflammation.
The study was performed on brain samples from 23 CTE positive deceased football players, 50 AD patients, and 18 non-athlete controls. The results of the analysis revealed 4 major conclusions. First, the authors note that levels of CCL11 were significantly increased in CTE patients compared with either AD (CTE expression normally increases late in disease progression) or WT controls. Next, the researchers noticed a direct correlation between the expression of CCL11 and the level of phosphorylated Tau in all samples independent of age. However, CCL11 expression did show a direct correlation not with patient age, but with the length of time a patient was actively playing football. Lastly, the researchers were able to take this analysis one step further and identify patients with CTE simply based off of the level of CCL11 in their Cerebral Spinal Fluid (CSF), however the authors note that a definitive conclusion on the relationship between CCL11 level and disease severity could not be determined without a larger sample size. These results indicate that in the near future, CCCL11 levels within patient CSF could be the first living biomarker of CTE and therefore save the lives of Americas favorite athletes.
Are you having difficulty designing the perfect immunogen for custorm mAb generation? Does your mAb have low specificity and/or affinity in different applications? Sign up today for this FREE webinar and learn how to design an optimum immunogen for your specific immunization stategy, price rang, downstream application, and more!
