SAN DIEGO: Aethlon Medical, Inc. has announced that Dr. Robert Stern, professor of neurology, neurosurgery, and anatomy and neurobiology at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) has presented preliminary, unpublished findings related to research being conducted by Aethlon Medical's majority owned subsidiary, Exosome Sciences, Inc. The presentation was given earlier today at the 5th Annual Traumatic Brain Injury Conference being held in Washington, D.C.
The findings are part of the Diagnosing and Evaluating Traumatic Encephalopathy using Clinical Tests (DETECT) study, a research project funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), being conducted at BUSM's CTE Program. The DETECT study examines potential biomarkers for CTE by studying a sample of former professional American football players and a control group of same-age men without any history of brain trauma from contact sport involvement. In connection with the DETECT study, researchers at Exosome Sciences have been applying proprietary techniques to isolate microscopic exosomes that transport CTE associated tau protein (tausomes) across the blood brain barrier.
As part of the DETECT project at BUSM, blood samples from 78 former NFL players and 16 control subjects were analyzed by Exosome Sciences researchers. In the study, researchers were able to isolate and quantify the presence of tausomes in the blood. During his presentation, Dr. Stern reported that former NFL players' tausome levels were measured to be significantly higher than those of the control subjects. Moreover, in the former NFL player group, tausome levels also significantly correlated with performance on formal memory tests; the higher the tausome level, the worse the memory performance. In contrast, previous cerebrospinal fluid measurements of tau and phosphorylated tau in the same subjects were not significantly correlated with memory test performance. The results presented by Dr. Stern are preliminary and additional testing will be required.