• Alzheimer's disease
• biomarkers
• blood serum
• chemometrics
• exosomes
• lymphocytes
• multivariate analysis
• Raman spectroscopy
• SERS

The growing burden of neurodegenerative diseases on society necessitates the development of improved diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. Raman spectroscopy is an emerging tool in the research and diagnosis of different diseases, including neurodegenerative disorders.
During my thesis work, I analyzed different types of biological matrices by Raman Spectroscopy and by Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS), to develop a classification model for the early diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases. In particular, I analyzed by Raman samples of exosomes, lymphocytes and serum collected from healthy controls (CTR) and from Alzheimer’s Type patients (DAT). The acquired spectra were recorded and processed by chemometric tools for multivariate analysis. SERS analysis was performed on lymphocyte samples using thin gold electrodes as SERS substrate.
Neither Raman and SERS analyses succeeded in finding disease biomarkers able to discriminate lymphocyte samples from different classes. Promising results were obtained from serum Raman analyses. Lower concentration levels of carotenoids were indeed detected in serum from DAT patients, that allowed a good discrimination (93% of correct predictions on the test set) of these samples respect to controls.