Identification of potential blood biomarkers for early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease through immune landscape analysis

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a clinical precursor of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Recent genetic studies have reported on associations between AD risk genes and immunity. Here, we obtained samples and data from 317 AD, 432 MCI, and 107 cognitively normal (CN) subjects and investigated immune-cell type composition and immune clonal diversity of T-cell receptor (TRA, TRB, TRG, and TRD) and B-cell receptor (IGH, IGK, and IGL) repertoires through bulk RNA sequencing. We found the proportions of plasma cells, γδ T cells, neutrophils, and B cells were significantly different and the diversities of IGH, IGK, and TRA were significantly small with AD progression. We then identified a differentially expressed gene, WDR37, in terms of risk of MCI-to-AD conversion. Our prognosis prediction model using the potential blood-based biomarkers for early AD diagnosis, which combined two immune repertoires (IGK and TRA), WDR37, and clinical information, successfully classified MCI patients into two groups, low and high, in terms of risk of MCI-to-AD conversion (log-rank test P = 2.57e-3). It achieved a concordance index of 0.694 in a discovery cohort and of 0.643 in an independent validation cohort. We believe that further investigation, using larger sample sizes, will lead to practical clinical use in the near future.