By Kwame Mensah —

Digilab Peptidomics announced last month that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had granted U.S. Patent No. 7,202,044, which is directed to a panel of biomarkers for the diagnosis of chronic dementia or a predisposition to such diseases.  According to the company’s press release, by using proprietary Peptidomics® technologies, Digilab scientists identified a group of Osteonpontin marker peptides that correlates to Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, and Parkinson’s disease.  Diglab believes that these new Peptidomics® biomarkers can be used in an alternative or supplementary method to the mini-mental score, as well as prove to be useful in early and reliable detection methods for the above diseases.  The ‘044 patent is one of three U.S. patents to be issued to the Hannover, Germany-based biotech company,  formerly known as BioVisioN AG.

The ‘044 patent issued from U.S. Application No. 10/476,976, which is a national stage application of International Application No. PCT/DE02/01665, filed May 8, 2002, which claims the benefit of German Application No. DE 101 22 543, filed May 9, 2001.  The lone independent claim of the ‘044 patent recites:

1.  A method for detecting Alzheimer’s disease in a patient, comprising the step of identifying, in a biological sample from said patient, an elevated concentration of at least one dementia-related osteopontin marker peptide selected from the group consisting of DROPN-5(SEQ ID NO:5), DROPN-10(SEQ ID NO:10), DROPN-20(SEQ ID NO:20), and phosphorylated DROPN-10(SEQ ID NO:10), when compared to a control, said elevated concentration of said at least one dementia-related osteopontin marker peptide being indicative of the existence of Alzheimer’s disease in said patient.

And dependent claims 2 and 3 recite:

2.  The method as claimed in claim 1, wherein the step of identifying includes the step of determining the relative concentration of said at least one marker peptide, compared with the concentration of the same peptide in a control sample, where

a)  the concentration change, which is specific for the particular marker peptide, in the biological sample is found relative to a control sample, and

b)  a significant marker peptide concentration change with an error probability of less than at least in 90% a) is regarded as positive detection result for the chronic dementia disease.

3.  The method as claimed in claim 1, wherein the identifying step is carried out in combination with a mini-mental state examination or a mini-mental score to increase the sensitivity and/or specificity thereof.