PROVO, Utah — While they may not have cured Alzheimer's, a team at Brigham Young University has discovered something so effective that one day, humans may never suffer the effects of the degenerative disease.
BYU Ph.D. student Chad Pollard earned the "Innovator of the Year" award at the school for spearheading the research and says they can now detect Alzheimer's diseases 10-15 years before current standard tests.
"As of right now, we're really confident we can at least identify it before any symptoms show up," Pollard explained, "Which is pretty awesome."
Dr. Tim Jenkins is Pollard's mentor at BYU and co-founder of the technology.
"The technology is solid," he said. "It's very, very sound, we're preparing the manuscript right now for publication."
Once the first hint of Alzheimer’s is detected, treatments can slow the disease progression to the point where a person could live symptomatic-free for the rest of their life.
"So the Alzheimer's might exist, you might have cell deterioration," Jenkins explained. "But once that's identified, you could apply a therapeutic that would then decrease that to such a low level that it's never going to be impactful to the individual’s lifestyle or to the individual themselves."
Perhaps just as incredible as this new biotechnology, is how Pollard came up with it.
"I woke up at three in the morning, went out and wrote everything down from like, three to five in the morning, my wife came out," Pollard chuckled. "She was like, 'What the heck are you doing?' And I was like, 'This sounds weird. But I think we can diagnose Alzheimer's disease really early.' And she was like, okay, I'm going back to bed.'"
Dr. Jenkins feels they haven’t come up with these ideas on their own as they blend science and faith at BYU.
"How all the cards have fallen with this, how we went from specific ideas that were only useful within one area, one field of medicine, and looked at how that's grown over time, just how things have come to place, there's no denying, in my mind that this has been inspired work," he reflected.
After the pair proved the formulas and patented the work, the business model to fund and get their technology into the world began in earnest.
People who wanted to invest and claim the technology immediately started calling.
The business is now lifting off the ground and the work continues, with efforts of a larger team of cell biology and physiology class-credit-craving students at BYU helping along the way.
"They just want the credit, you can try to offer them money and they'll say no, please give me the credit," Pollard explained.
Overall, Jenkins and Pollard are pinching themselves knowing that their technology has the potential to change the world.
"We think it is going to be world-changing," Jenkins said. "The hope is that we get this to a point where it's part of a surveillance screen, an annual screening for people that are of the right age range, so that they can be just looking to see if the amount of DNA that's coming from dying brain cells is increasing. If it is then we can take action."
The tests the scientists have developed also have the potential to also target and diagnose other degenerative diseases like Parkinson's, ALS, MS and Huntington’s
To be notified as soon as tests are available to the public, click here and join the waitlist.
