R2therapies unveils potential prognostic key for Alzheimer’s

An unexpected scientific discovery

“It is fair to say that R2therapies is a the results of a chain of coincidences. It all started as a drug development project,” says Ilkka Fagerlund, co-founder of R2therapies.

In Kuopio, Finland, a team of scientists studying brain cells encountered unexpected results during a routine experiment. Although initially perceived as a technical problem hindering their research, further investigation revealed the occurrence to be a genuine biological phenomenon and a prospective novel therapeutic target for Alzheimer’s that the team recently published.

This phenomenon, identified through extensive review of scientific literature, appears to be a physiological property of red blood cells which has not been linked to Alzheimer’s disease before.

“We connected these findings and analysed patient samples from Kuopio University Hospital, and showed that the same mechanism is also affected in the red blood cells of Alzheimer’s patients that revealed a previously unidentified feature related to Alzheimer’s disease – one that we are looking to translate into a biomarker to predict the onset of Alzheimer’s, and possibly to stratify the patients into distinct subsets that may in the future benefit from different treatments,” Fagerlund says.