Building the Tools Parkinson’s Disease Research Needs 

Quanterix is one of several Co-Investigator institutions on PD-BUILD.
What is the team’s specific mandate? 

Our role in PD-BUILD is to serve as the development and distribution site for multiplex protein assays targeting Parkinson’s disease biomarkers in plasma and cerebrospinal fluid. The project is structured in a tiered workflow: the Banner Sun Health Research Institute leads the program overall, Abcam provides antibody reagents, and our team at Quanterix is responsible for taking those reagents and building them into validated single and multiplex immunoassays on the Simoa platform, and then distributing those assays to the broader research community. The goal is to generate a harmonized suite of tools spanning 15 or more biomarkers that other scientists can reliably use for early detection, patient stratification, and treatment monitoring in PD clinical trials. 

Why was Simoa selected as the assay platform for this project? 

The short answer is sensitivity, and what sensitivity makes possible at scale. Most proteins relevant to Parkinson’s disease circulate in blood at extremely low concentrations, levels that conventional ELISAs simply cannot reliably detect. Simoa addresses this by digitizing single-molecule detection events in femtoliter-volume wells, which gives us roughly 1,000-fold greater sensitivity than conventional immunoassays. For targets like phosphorylated alpha-synuclein and LRRK2, the sensitivity gap is the difference between measuring the target accurately or generating noise. PD-BUILD is focusing on pharmacologically limited and emerging targets where sensitivity headroom matters enormously, and Simoa was built precisely for that problem. 

What made Simoa the right choice for a project explicitly designed to distribute tools to a global research community? 

Reproducibility across sites is the other half of the equation. A lot of platforms can generate a sensitive signal in one lab. Simoa has demonstrated the ability to do it consistently across hundreds of academic and pharmaceutical institutions worldwide. For an open-science initiative like ASAP, where the whole point is to produce tools that other scientists can pick up and use without re-optimizing, that cross-site standardization is non-negotiable. Beyond the technology itself, Quanterix brings a commercial manufacturing and distribution infrastructure that most academic platforms can’t replicate. We can produce assay kits at scale, quality-control them, and get them into formats that researchers can globally deploy. That’s a meaningful differentiator when the mandate is also  distribution, not just development.  I would add that Quanterix is one of the few platforms that supports both off-the-shelf solutions and a homebrew capability for researchers who want to develop their own content. That flexibility is genuinely important for adoption among ambitious investigators in this space. 

Is there precedent for Simoa playing this kind of anchor role in neurodegeneration biomarker research? 

Yes, and it’s part of why we were written into this grant. In Alzheimer’s disease, Simoa has been central to some of the most consequential standardization work in the field. I was directly involved in the Global Biomarker Standardization Consortium plasma phospho-tau Round Robin study, which evaluated pTau-217 across 33 assay formats and 8 platforms and helped establish it as a leading AD biomarker candidate. That work required exactly the kind of multi-site reproducibility and measurement rigor that PD-BUILD demands. We’re now applying that same infrastructure and mindset to Parkinson’s disease, where the biomarker landscape is far less developed and the heterogeneity problem is acute. The scientific opportunity is significant, and there’s a credible precedent for what Simoa can do in this context. 

What does Quanterix R&D bring to a project of this scope, and how does it complement the other co-investigators? 

What PD-BUILD’s Tool Generation theme ultimately requires is someone who can think about assay development the way a regulated product developer would: with rigorous quality control, reproducibility, and distribution in mind. That’s the specific gap Quanterix fills. 

I’ve spent over 20 years leading R&D programs across ELISAs, multiplex bead-based assays, chemiluminescence, and immunofluorescence, several of which resulted in FDA 510(k)-cleared devices at Werfen and Trinity Biotech. Our team at Quanterix approaches every program with that same product development rigor. 

Within the investigator team, the roles are well-delineated: Nicholas Ashton leads the program and brings deep expertise in AD/PD biomarker clinical validation; Henrik Zetterberg is one of the world’s leading voices in neurodegeneration biomarker science; and Ravindran Kumaran anchors the antibody development work. Our team acts as the operational translation layer – taking those antibody reagents through multiplex assay construction, quality verification, and into a form that can be manufactured and distributed at scale.

How does this fit within Quanterix’s broader direction in neurodegenerative disease? 

PD-BUILD reflects something we’ve believed for a while: that the infrastructure for measuring disease biology reliably, at scale, and across sites is as important as any individual scientific discovery. In Alzheimer’s, we’ve seen what happens when measurement tools mature alongside the science. Clinical trials become more efficient, patient selection improves, and the field moves faster. Parkinson’s disease research is earlier in that arc. The heterogeneity of PD has made it genuinely difficult to run well-powered clinical trials, partly because we haven’t had the tools to stratify patients by biological subtype. This project is directly addressing that gap. Being embedded in that effort- not just as a vendor but as a Co-Investigator shaping how these tools are built and validated- is exactly where we want to be.