Expression and Activity of the Small RhoGTPase Cdc42 in Blood Cells of Older Adults Are Associated With Age and Cardiovascular Disease.

The small RhoGTPase Cdc42 is mechanistically linked to aging of multiple tissues and to rejuvenation of hematopoietic stem cells in mice. However, data validating Cdc42 activity and expression as biomarker for aging in humans are still missing. Here, we hypothesized that Cdc42 might serve as a novel biomarker of aging in older adults and therefore we determined Cdc42 activity and expression levels in peripheral blood cells from a cohort of 196 donors. We investigated the association of these parameters with both chronological and biological aging. We also tested in this cohort of older adults a recently published algorithm determining chronological age based on DNA methylation profiles. A positive correlation with chronological age was found for both the level of Cdc42 mRNA and the level of active Cdc42 protein (the GTP bound form). Notably, the level of Cdc42 mRNA as well as total protein showed a specific strong association to cardiovascular disease and Cdc42 mRNA levels also to a history of myocardial infarction. In summary, these data validate Cdc42 as a blood biomarker of both chronological aging as well as aging-associated diseases like cardiovascular disease and myocardial infarction.

Analysing saturable antibody binding based on serum data and pharmacokinetic modelling.

In radioimmunotherapy, organ dose calculations are frequently based on pretherapeutic biodistribution measurements, assuming equivalence between pretherapeutic and therapeutic biodistribution. However, when saturation of antibody binding sites is important, this assumption might not be justified. Residual antibody and different amounts of administered antibody may lead to a considerably altered therapeutic biodistribution. In this study we developed a method based on serum activity measurements to investigate this effect in radioimmunotherapy with (90)Y-labelled anti-CD66 antibody. Pretherapeutic and therapeutic serum activity data of ten patients with acute leukaemia were fitted to a set of four parsimonious pharmacokinetic models. All models included the key mechanisms of antibody binding, immunoreactivity and degradation; however, they differed with respect to linear or nonlinear binding and global or individual fitting of the model parameters. The empirically most supported model was chosen according to the corrected Akaike information criterion. The nonlinear models were most supported by the data (sum of probabilities approximately 100%). Using the presented method, we identified relevant saturable binding for radioimmunotherapy with (90)Y-labelled anti-CD66 antibody solely based on serum data. This general method may also be applicable to investigate other systems where saturation of binding sites might be important.