Funding for LMU research on progressive supranuclear palsy

Enlarge

An interdisciplinary LMU research team led by Günter Höglinger, Professor of Neurology and Director of the Department of Neurology at LMU University Hospital, has been granted a CurePSP Biomarker Accelerator Program award of approximately 500,000 US dollars. In the three-year project, the researchers will further develop and validate new biomarkers for progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP). The goal is to detect the disease with greater biological precision in the future and create new possibilities for diagnostics and clinical studies.

PSP is a rare neurodegenerative disease from the group of atypical Parkinson’s syndromes. Diagnosis can be difficult particularly in its early stages, as its symptoms overlap with those of other neurodegenerative diseases. There is currently no definitive diagnostic biomarker available for PSP. This complicates both early diagnostic classification and the targeted selection of biologically homogeneous patient groups for therapeutic studies.

Molecular biomarkers and PET imaging visualize changes in the brain

The funded project combines molecular biomarkers from blood and cerebrospinal fluid with highly specialized PET imaging. The focus is on so-called extracellular vesicles (EVs) – small particles, released by cells, that transport proteins, RNA, and DNA. Using techniques established at LMU, it is possible to study EV populations that are associated with different cell types of the nervous system. Their molecular composition is expected to provide indications of disease-related changes in the brain.

The research team will compare these molecular signatures at the level of individual patients using PET techniques that capture different aspects of disease biology. In particular, they will investigate whether information from the specialized imaging is reflected in robust and more easily accessible biomarkers from blood or cerebrospinal fluid. Promising biomarker signatures will then be validated in an independent patient cohort.

Diagnosing and capturing the progression of PSP with greater precision

In the long term, such a multimodal biomarker approach could help doctors diagnose PSP with greater biological precision, stratify patients more effectively for clinical studies, and potentially capture disease progression and therapeutic effects more objectively. The project will build on existing patient cohorts, biological samples, PET data, and comprehensive methodological groundwork.

The project combines expertise from neurology, nuclear medicine, image analysis, extracellular vesicle biology, omics technologies, and bioinformatics. In addition to Günter Höglinger, the following researchers are part of the project: Professor Franziska Hopfner, Dr. Carla Palleis, and Dr. Alexander Bernhardt from the Department of Neurology; Professor Matthias Brendel from the Department of Nuclear Medicine; Professor Nicolai Franzmeier from the Institute for Stroke and Dementia Research (ISD); and Dr. Mojtaba Nemati and Dr. Marcel Bayer from the fields of EV methodology, omics, and bioinformatics.