Alcediag announces first blood test to diagnose bipolar disorder

French mental health diagnostics company Alcediag announced the results of a study that identified six blood biomarkers as major hallmarks of bipolar disorder.

Alcediag said in a press release that its 410-subject study, published in Nature’s Translational Psychiatry, resulted in a reliable and accurate test capable of differentiating the depressive phases of bipolar disorder from unipolar depression.

This test, with high diagnostic performance, specificity and sensitivity greater than 80%, was facilitated by the combined use of RNA editing and artificial intelligence, the company said. The six biomarkers identified match modifications in the RNA sequence of genes associated with bipolar disorder.

"I am happy and proud to see this paper published in Nature magazine’s journal of Translational Psychiatry,” Dinah Weissmann, deputy CEO of Alcediag, said in the release. “The importance of our team’s work is in harnessing the power of RNA editing — a mechanism [that] regulates RNA stability, splicing, gene expression and protein synthesis — to create a high-performance test that is able to differentiate between unipolar depression and bipolar depression.”

The study will be continued by a European project called EDIT-B and supported by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology for Health. Launched in March, the partnership includes Alcediag, Psychiatric Center Copenhagen, Clinical Hospital of Barcelona and its foundation Hospital Clínic de Barcelona and Fundació Clinic per la Recerca Biomèdica, GHU Paris Psychiatry & Neurosciences, Hospital Parc Sanitari Sant Joan de Déu and its foundation Fundació Sant Joan de Déu, ProductLife Group, and Synlab.