Antibody biomarker for de novo Parkinson disease: attempted validation

Parkinson disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease with motor symptoms that result from degeneration of midbrain dopaminergic neurons. Biomarker research seeks to identify the disease during the pre-symptomatic phase, which is a time when therapeutic intervention will be most helpful. Previously, we screened a combinatorial peptoid library to search for antibodies that are present at much higher levels in the serum of PD patients than in control subjects. One such compound, called the PD2 peptoid, was 84% accurate for the identification of de novo PD when employed as the capture agent in an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. This peptoid recognized an IgG3 antibody, and IgG3 levels were also found to be significantly higher in PD vs. control serum. In that study we used samples from the NINDS Parkinson’s Disease Biomarker Program. The current study sought to validate that finding using serum samples from de novo and control subjects in the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative study. We found no difference in levels of antibodies captured by the PD2 peptoid in the de novo PD vs. control subjects, and no difference in IgG3 serum levels in the two groups. The failure to replicate our previous study appears to be due to the lack of difference in serum IgG3 levels between the PD and control subjects in the current study.