An Effort to Detect and Treat Alzheimer’s at Its Earliest Stages

What It Covers

Valerie Daggett, founder and CEO of AltPep, explains how her company targets alpha sheet toxic oligomers — structural precursors to Alzheimer's plaques detectable up to 16 years before symptoms — using synthetic peptides designed to both diagnose and neutralize these early-stage disease triggers.

Key Questions Answered

• •Early detection window: Alpha sheet toxic oligomers form 10–30 years before Alzheimer's symptoms appear, making them detectable far earlier than amyloid plaques visible on PET imaging. AltPep's blood-based SOBA assay has retrospectively identified disease in banked samples up to 16 years before clinical onset, opening a treatment window current diagnostics cannot access.
• •Structural targeting vs. antibody limitations: Existing FDA-approved antibody therapies bind 3–5 amino acid surface epitopes, making them unable to distinguish toxic oligomers from benign amyloid forms. AltPep's synthetic peptides target alpha sheet structure directly, achieving nanomolar binding selectivity — enabling the same compound to function as both a diagnostic capture agent and a therapeutic neutralizer.
• •Intranasal therapeutic delivery: AltPep's SOBIN therapeutic is administered intranasally, allowing it to reach diffusing toxic oligomers in the brain. In transgenic mouse models, intranasal dosing over 12 months reduced plaque formation and improved learning and memory — without binding plaques directly — by stimulating microglial clearance of upstream oligomers.
• •Companion diagnostic as trial tool: SOBA functions as a mechanism-linked biomarker, tracking toxic oligomer burden in blood the way tumor burden is tracked in oncology. In animal studies, SOBIN treatment produced measurable drops in SOBA readings, enabling patient stratification, target confirmation, and treatment monitoring within a single integrated platform.
• •Platform extensibility across 14 amyloid diseases: AltPep has confirmed alpha sheet structure in 14 amyloid protein systems, including alpha-synuclein in Parkinson's, transthyretin in cardiac amyloidosis, and islet amyloid polypeptide in type 2 diabetes — the largest amyloid disease by patient count. The same SOBA assay detects all variants, using conventional antibodies only to identify which protein was captured.