Fully automated and highly specific plasma β-amyloid immunoassays predict β-amyloid status defined by amyloid positron emission tomography with high accuracy

Abstract

Background: Clinicians, researchers, and patients alike would greatly benefit from more accessible and inexpensive biomarkers for neural β-amyloid (Aβ). We aimed to assess the performance of fully automated plasma Aβ immunoassays, which correlate significantly with immunoprecipitation mass spectrometry assays, in predicting brain Aβ status as determined by visual read assessment of amyloid positron emission tomography (PET). Methods: The plasma Aβ42/Aβ40 ratio was measured using a fully automated immunoassay platform (HISCL series) in two clinical studies (discovery and validation studies). The discovery and validation sample sets were retrospectively and randomly selected from participants with early Alzheimer’s disease (AD) identified during screening for the elenbecestat Phase 3 program. Results: We included 197 participants in the discovery study (mean [SD] age 71.1 [8.5] years; 112 females) and 200 in the validation study (age 70.8 [7.9] years; 99 females). The plasma Aβ42/Aβ40 ratio predicted amyloid PET visual read status with areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves of 0.941 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.910–0.973) and 0.868 (95% CI 0.816–0.920) in the discovery and validation studies, respectively. In the discovery study, a cutoff value of 0.102 was determined based on maximizing the Youden Index, and the sensitivity and specificity were calculated to be 96.0% (95% CI 90.1–98.9%) and 83.5% (95% CI 74.6–90.3%), respectively. Using the same cutoff value, the sensitivity and specificity in the validation study were calculated to be 88.0% (95% CI 80.0–93.6%) and 72.0% (95% CI 62.1–80.5%), respectively. Conclusions: The plasma Aβ42/Aβ40 ratio measured using the HISCL series achieved high accuracy in predicting amyloid PET status. Since our blood-based immunoassay system is less invasive and more accessible than amyloid PET and cerebrospinal fluid testing, it may contribute to the diagnosis of AD in routine clinical practice.