Transcriptomic analysis of PBMC, CD4 memory and CD8 memory T cells in Alzheimer's disease patients and age-matched controls

Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a chronic multifactorial and complex neurodegenerative disorder is a leading cause of dementia. Recently, neuroinflammation has been hypothesized as a contributing factor to AD pathogenesis. The role of adaptive immune responses against neuronal antigens, which can either confer protection or induce damage in AD, has not been fully characterized. Here, we measured T cell responses to several potential antigens of neural origin including amyloid precursor protein (APP), amyloid beta (Ab), tau, a-synuclein, and transactive response DNA binding protein (TDP-43) in patients with AD and age-matched healthy controls (HC). Antigen-specific T cell reactivity was detected for all tested antigens, and response to tau-derived epitopes was particularly strong, but no significant differences between individuals with AD and age-matched HC were identified. Additionally, further characterization did not reveal any differences in the expression of genes between AD patients and HC. These observations have not identified a key role of neuronal antigen-specific T cell responses in AD. PBMCs (HC n=28 and AD n=27), CD4 memory (HC n=28 and AD n=27) and CD8 memory (HC n=30 and AD n=26) T cells from AD and HC subjects were sorted and RNA was extracted. **The submitter declares that the raw data cannot be made available via any mechanism due to patient privacy concerns.**