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Prof. Kaj Blennow Presents Promising Results on Biomarkers for Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease Using Ciphergen's SELDI ProteinChip(R) System Study and Data Presented During Plenary Lecture at the 9th International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease FREMONT, Calif., July 22 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Ciphergen Biosystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CIPH) announced today that Prof. Kaj Blennow from the University of Gothenburg presented encouraging data from a comprehensive clinical study of human cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) comparing very mild Alzheimer's Disease patients with normal individuals and non-AD dementia controls comprising a total of 236 samples. Scientists at Ciphergen's Diagnostics Division discovered over 40 biomarkers that were either increased or decreased in Alzheimer's Disease and considered statistically meaningful. These biomarkers encompass many different aspects of AD neuropathology which make them potentially useful for further research into disease mechanism. Using multi-biomarker combinations, initial assays were developed that yielded diagnostic performance of approximately 86% accuracy in detecting early stage Alzheimer's Disease. Such assays, when confirmed in validation studies, may prove useful to physicians in differentiating AD from other forms of dementia as well as by pharmaceutical companies for therapeutic monitoring assays in both pre-clinical and clinical development. Follow-on studies are underway in CSF and serum samples of pathology confirmed cases. Prof. Blennow stated, "SELDI is a powerful method in the search for CSF biomarkers and it picked up biomarkers previously missed by other proteomic methods. We have generated promising results both for Alzheimer's Disease and Frontotemporal Dementia, and are identifying proteins clearly linked to the pathogenesis." "Ciphergen's Diagnostics Division fully intends to pursue translating these novel biomarkers into multi-biomarker SELDI-based assays for the diagnosis and treatment monitoring of Alzheimer's Disease," stated Gail S. Page, President of Ciphergen's Diagnostics Division. Working with collaborators and well characterized sample collections from the University of Kuopio and Sahlgren's University Hospital, in approximately 4 months a scientific team from Ciphergen Diagnostics' Biomarker Discovery Center(R) laboratory in Copenhagen discovered 44 biomarkers (P