The Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) has awarded Dr. Neil Vasdev a grant to “support the development of tools to advance our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease by tracking its progression, improving patient selection for clinical trials, and monitoring patient response to drugs in trials.”
Translation of an Optimized PET Radiopharmaceutical for Imaging Tau Pathology in Alzheimer’s Patients
The invention of imaging agents used in positron emission tomography (PET) to detect amyloid plaques (such as the ADDF-funded Amyvid™ test) led to major breakthroughs in clinical dementia research and drug development. In such studies, radioactive drug molecules (radiopharmaceuticals) are injected and the distributions of those molecules are measured using a PET camera. A similar imaging agent for tau proteins, thought to play an important role in early Alzheimer’s disease, could lead to more breakthroughs by allowing researchers to rapidly identify novel Alzheimer’s drug treatments that engage and modify the tau proteins in the brain. Dr. Vasdev and collaborators from Merck will develop and evaluate a new tau imaging agent in clinical tests.
This announcement was originally published in the ADDF newsroom on 05/10/2016: https://alzdiscovery.org/news-room/view/ten-new-grants-support-alzheimers-drug-discovery-and-biomarker-development