Scientists have built an electronic sensor that can detect early markers of Parkinson’s disease in blood. The technology could one day help spot the disease long before symptoms appear.

The sensor was developed at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. It measures several forms of alpha-synuclein, a protein linked to Parkinson’s, at extremely low concentrations in blood samples.

Detecting these proteins in blood is hard because more than 95 per cent of circulating alpha-synuclein comes from red blood cells, creating background noise. The new approach reads multiple forms of the protein together for a clearer signal.

In a blinded test with 59 people from the Oxford Discovery cohort, the platform reached 90.9 per cent accuracy in telling disease-linked profiles from healthy ones. The group included Parkinson’s patients, healthy controls and people with a sleep disorder tied to higher Parkinson’s risk.

Associate Professor Sahika Inal called the early results encouraging. She said the next step is to validate the technology in much larger groups of patients before it can move toward clinical use.