The method to quickly discover compounds or bioproteins that decompose amyloid-beta oligomers, known as the main cause for Alzheimer’s disease, has been developed by local researchers, The National Research Foundation of Korea said in a news release Wednesday.

The joint research team developed such a platform by successfully coating pure amyloid-beta oligomers in the form of protein corona on plasma nanoparticles' surface. Professor Yoon Dae-sung from the Department of Biomedical Engineering from Korea University and others from Professor Lee Jeong-hoon, Lee Gyu-do and Hwang Kyo-seon from Universities in Korea participated in the development. 

The team used a method in which nanoparticles coagulate one another and change its absorbance, its solution ending up turning red, they said. It allows screening of compounds or bioproteins to selectively decompose oligomers due to color changes in the solution, which reduces procedures of additional preparing for fluorescent materials for tracking, they added.

The platform reduces the time to explore the compounds, from several days to three to six hours, which will let the discovery of Alzheimer’s treatment candidates be more active, researchers said. It also uses less than 50 times of the existing amyloid-beta, which is highly-priced. 

“The discovery is significant considering the existing difficulty of synthesizing and purifying pure oligomers, and there was no fluorescent material that could be labeled, making researchers difficult to discover large number of candidate materials targeting them,” the team said. “We proved its efficacy using six types of low molecular chemicals known to help ease off Alzheimer’s Disease, and two types of bioproteins remove amyloid-beta in vivo.”

The experiment results were published in Nature Communications Wednesday.