Team:MIT

Improving the Diagnosis and Treatment of

ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE

Neurodegenerative disease

Sixth leading cause of death in the US

Current diagnostics and therapeutics
are ineffective

Alzheimer's disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States, affecting more than 5 million Americans and resulting in the deaths of 500,000 people every year (Alzheimer's Association). Though one in three seniors dies with this disease (Alzheimer's Association), it currently has no cure, and existing diagnosis methods are unreliable. MIT iGEM 2014 is working to change this. We set out to devise a way to diagnose Alzheimer's disease using biological rather than psychological tests and to invent a dynamic treatment mechanism that would capitalize on recent findings about the molecular pathology of the disease. Using the principles of synthetic biology, we designed a system that detects molecular biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease (neurotoxic beta-amyloid plaques and specific changes in miRNA levles) and alters the levels of key enzymes in response (BACE1 and BACE2, involved in beta-amyloid production and degradation, respectively). In the future, a system like ours could provide a solution for patients suffering from the debilitating effects of Alzheimer's disease and alleviate the

DETECTION → TREATMENT → DELIVERY

DETECTION

TREATMENT

DELIVERY