Identifying biomarkers for monitoring disease progression in experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (THER7P.942)

Abstract

Abstract Multiple sclerosis (MS) is the most common demyelinating neuroinflammatory disorder which afflicts over 400,000 Americans. Currently, determining clinical or sub-clinical disease progression in MS patients and development of novel treatments has been hampered by the lack of specific and sensitive laboratory tests. Recently, our lab has developed a technique called M2 proteomics, which is a rapid quantitative approach for identifying putative protein biomarkers and therapeutic targets of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), a commonly used animal model for MS. Notably, we identified several putative-biomarkers which correlate with different stages of monophasic EAE. The objective of this study is to identify protein biomarkers of disease progression in a progressive EAE model using non-obese diabetic (NOD) mice. We hypothesize that during progressive EAE key central nervous system (CNS) disease-specific proteins will be released into blood and changes of these proteins can be used to determine disease progression. Using the progressive NOD EAE model, we determined the expression of putative CNS-specific protein biomarkers by immune assay in brain homogenate and serum longitudinally over the course of disease. We identified several CNS-specific potential biomarkers in serum that correlated with the progression of disease. The results of this study could help development of biomarkers for disease progression and testing of novel treatments for progressive MS.