JUPITER —Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter have developed a new technology that appears to accurately diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, and possibly other tough-to-diagnose diseases, before telltale symptoms appear.

The technology, described in a paper in the respected scientific journal Cell this month, is in a very early stage.

Believing in its potential, a Miami-based company, Opko Health Laboratories, has licensed the technology and is expanding its research and development office in Jupiter, near Scripps, with an eye toward commercializing the test and applying it toward other diseases, including cancer, a spokesman said. Opko’s chairman and CEO is Dr. Phillip Frost, former CEO of Ivax Pharmaceuticals. He is a member of Scripps’ board of trustees.

The research, by Scripps Florida chemist Thomas Kodadek, may represent one of the most significant and commercially important discoveries to come out of the institute since it was founded with more than a half-billion taxpayer dollars in 2004.

Yet the intellectual property rights belong to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School — not to Scripps and Florida. Kodadek, who had his own lab at UT, was recruited to Scripps in 2009.

Scripps President Dr. Richard Lerner predicted there would be more intellectual property to come from Kodadek’s lab, and he noted the discovery will mean jobs for the Jupiter area.

The technology behind the Alzheimer’s discovery is essentially an immune system reader. it is designed to pick out antibodies, the immune system’s targeting system, without knowing in advance what it’s searching for, Kodadek said.

Dr. James M. Anderson, director of the National Institutes of Health Division of Program Coordination, Planning and Strategic Initiatives, which funded Kodadek’s research, credited his group with bold and groundbreaking thinking.

“The results in the paper suggest great potential for using this approach to rapidly develop diagnostic biomarkers for a variety of significant human diseases,” Anderson said.

Kodadek said the idea came to him five years ago, while he was sitting in a UT seminar about lupus, an autoimmune disease which is, like Alzheimer’s, difficult to diagnose and treat. the longer the speakers went on about the difficulty of characterizing and diagnosing lupus, the more frustrated he grew.

“I vividly remember I was thinking, ‘You guys are in the 16th century,’ ” Kodadek said.

He started turning over ways to automate and speed up analysis of the immune system’s record.

Kodadek and his research team were able to create artificial molecules that could snag antibodies so that they could be tagged and identified.

Because they had compared antibodies captured from both sick and well volunteers, they zeroed in on differences, leading them to their likely biomarkers. Further testing validated their theory.

Beyond the technology’s diagnostic usefulness, the findings raise many scientific questions, Lerner said. What are the antibodies reacting to? Inflammation? Are they recognizing an active virus? If so, it would send Alzheimer’s research in a totally new direction. Scripps is studying this now, he said.

“Normally, you don’t make antibodies to yourself,” Lerner said. “We don’t have any clue what these are. either they are antibodies from some exotic thing like a virus, or they are antibodies to self.”

Interestingly, a control subject’s blood turned up some of the same antibodies as the Alzheimer’s subjects. She was a 75-year-old woman who performed well on memory tests and had no outward signs of disease. Kodadek believes the microarray picked up early Alzheimer’s. a key now will be assessing how early these antibody biomarkers appear.

Several other groups of scientists have been trying to find biomarkers that distinguish Alzhiemer’s disease. At Stanford University, Tony Wyss-Coray’s team has found 18 proteins involved in cell communication that appear to be specific to Alzheimer’s disease.

Wyss-Coray called Kodadek’s method “an exciting new tool,” one that had potential to speed immune research. But he cautioned that Kodadek has only studied small numbers, and other studies looking for Alzheimer’s antibodies have had mixed results. more study is needed.

“It remains to be shown how the test would perform if another 1,000 samples were measured,” Wyss-Coray said. Fortunately, he said, that should be relatively easy and quick to do.

If it proves true that these antibodies are attacking some element specific to the progression of Alzheimer’s, that has major implications, he said.

“That would most certainly change the current view of this disease,” he said.

It could also alter the path of Alzheimer’s drug trials.

The lack of a good diagnostic test for Alzhiemer’s is a drag on the search for a cure right now, said Dr. Mark Brody, president of Brain Matters Research, a Delray Beach clinic that conducts drug trials. People are not enrolled until their brain has suffered serious damage, and by then, it may be too late for a drug to change the course of the disease.

Doctors use a combination of brain scans, spinal fluid tests, memory tests and medical history to reach a diagnosis, but because many things can cause dementia, the accuracy isn’t perfect.

“Probably on the order of 15 percent of people in clinical trials for Alzhiemer’s disease don’t actually have Alzheimer’s disease,” Brody said. “If we can pick up people in a reliable way in the preclinical stage, using serum, that would be a paradigm shift.”