House of Byrne Lab

Here's an open access link to full text of our paper shared last week! rdcu.be/evKF9

Seeing the trees in the wood: the importance of co-pathologies in Alzheimer’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies Our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) owes a debt to pioneering work by Emil Kraepelin, Franz Nissl, Alois Alzh

I’m delighted to share my editorial for the July issue @brain1878.bsky.social academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

Important paper on accessible biomarkers from @hob-lab.bsky.social. Well done Annabelle Coleman @drl-bo.bsky.social and all.

Evaluating finger-prick blood collection for remote quantification of neurofilament light in neurological diseases - Journal of Neurology Promising blood-based biomarkers of neuropathology have emerged with potential for therapeutic development and disease monitoring. However, these tools will require specialist tertiary services for in...

New paper from the @hob-lab.bsky.social just published in Journal of Neurology. A step toward more accessible biomarker testing 🩸 link.springer.com/article/10.1... @drl-bo.bsky.social @uclbrainscience.bsky.social @uclqsion.bsky.social

And finally, the biggest thank you to the participants who contributed their time and blood samples for this work. You are the reason we do what we do! 😘

This work was funded by the Medical Research Council under @drl-bo.bsky.social CDA fellowship. We are so grateful to them for enabling this work.

In conclusion, we have technically validated this finger-prick collection approach for remote quantification of NfL. We are working on applying this to our clinical cohorts so watch this space for upcoming publications on how this approach could impact clinical monitoring.

Somatic CAG repeat expansion in blood associates with biomarkers of neurodegeneration in Huntington’s disease decades before clinical motor diagnosis - Nature Medicine A comprehensive longitudinal analysis of individuals with preclinical Huntington’s disease identifies biomarkers of neurodegeneration and somatic expansion in blood DNA, detectable years before sympto...

The HD-YAS cohort is a unique cohort of far from onset HD mutation carriers were NfL was shown to diverge from age-matched controls up to 24 years from predicted onset. The longitundinal analysis was recently published in Nature Medicine & we recommend you check it out www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We replicated the consistency between NfL concentrations in venous and capillary blood samples in a confirmatory cohort (recruited from the HD-Young Adult Study). We also replicated NfL’s disease group differences and CAG dependent relationship witg age.

Capillary NfL showed the same clinical disease group differences as venous NfL in the multi‑disease discovery cohort.

N.B. We were not powered for these group comparisons but did this to illustrate that the pattern is the same as the gold standard

Only NfL showed high stability after seven‑day delayed processing in venous and capillary serum and plasma in the multi‑disease discovery cohort despite a huge amount of haemolysis evident in the samples. GFAP was still correlated but clearly started to go down after 7 days delay.

NfL and GFAP showed high stability after three‑day delayed processing in venous and capillary serum and plasma in the multi‑disease discovery cohort. Again data falls on y=x

Total protein and haemoglobin were included to the impact of delayed process on the average protein.

NfL and GFAP concentrations were highly correlated in venous and capillary serum and plasma in a multi‑disease discovery cohort including MS, ALS, HD, and PD participants. Notice how values lie along the y=x line of equality!

We first adapted a finger‑prick collection approach for NfL quantification and set up several experiments to assess whether it was the same as the gold standard venepuncture, and whether delayed sample processing would impact NfL values. We tested other potential biomarkers GFAP and Total Tau

Being able to monitor NfL levels remotely could minimise patient burden, increase geographical outreach for research, and allow for more frequent sampling.

Neurofilament light (NfL) in blood is an indicator of ongoing neuronal injury, and so, is a strong candidate biomarker for many neurological conditions including Multiple Sclerosis (MS), Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), and Huntington's Disease (HD)

Evaluating finger-prick blood collection for remote quantification of neurofilament light in neurological diseases - Journal of Neurology Promising blood-based biomarkers of neuropathology have emerged with potential for therapeutic development and disease monitoring. However, these tools will require specialist tertiary services for in...

We are delighted to present the first publication out of the lab, available online today, titled ‘Evaluating finger-prick blood collection for remote quantification of neurofilament light in neurological diseases’ link.springer.com/article/10.1...