HOUSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Alzeca Biosciences announced successful preliminary preclinical results for ADx, its innovative, proprietary diagnostic imaging technology, designed to enable diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease a decade or more before the onset of symptoms of cognitive decline.

“Alzeca has brought together incredible breakthrough science and a highly experienced leadership team to accelerate the company’s strategy and address a huge unmet need for physicians and patients alike in neurodegenerative disease”
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Successful development of ADx would make early and reliable Alzheimer’s testing broadly available, using magnetic resonance (MR) technology, at far lower cost and without the radiation of current positron emission (PET) scans. Earlier detection of Alzheimer’s could revolutionize the treatment of the disease and vastly improve the efficiency of clinical trials for new therapies by identifying appropriate candidates.
“Alzeca is building a pipeline with a multi-modality and multi-disease approach using our proprietary technology platform ADx,” said Carlo Medici, Chief Executive Officer, Alzeca Biosciences. “Following these positive results, we will aggressively bring this unique technology to the next phases of development and pursue partnerships that will enable us accelerate the company’s strategy.”

Alzeca is also exploring the significant additional potential of the underlying platform of ADx, which can be modified to bind to different targets in the brain. With these modifications, the platform could be used to image and diagnose other serious neurodegenerative diseases, and even be used as a drug delivery system for those diseases.

Related information: http://www.alzeca.com/

Initial Tests Yield Strong Preclinical Results

In peer-reviewed studies, ADx nanoparticles demonstrated the ability to carry an encapsulated imaging agent across the blood-brain barrier and bind precisely to amyloid plaques in the brains of test mice. Researchers were then able to obtain precise, high-resolution images of those plaques using ordinary MR equipment. These results, along with successful preliminary toxicity studies, have prompted Alzeca to accelerate the development and testing of ADx with the goal of beginning human clinical trials in 2018. Related information: http://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease/jad151124

Significant Unmet Need

More than 27 million people suffer from Alzheimer’s disease today globally, and it is the sixth leading cause of death in the US. By 2050, the disease could result in a $1.1 trillion annual cost to the US healthcare system, in current dollars, not including the very high cost of unpaid care. Yet there is no cost-effective, readily available, reliable way to diagnose the disease before the onset of cognitive decline – which is when current Alzheimer’s therapies are most likely to be effective.

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