Taken for Parkinson’s News
New PET Tracer with Potential to Diagnose Parkinson’s to Be Tested in
First-in-Human Study
In News.
An innovative Positron Emission
Tomography (PET) tracer that has the potential to diagnose Parkinson’s disease will soon be tested in humans
for the first time.
Led by Switzerland-based AC Immune, which
developed the technology, the study is expected to begin in the second half of
2018. The company recently presented the data on its new product at the AAT-AD/PDTM Focus Meeting 2018 in Turin, Italy.
“We are excited about this
significant step in our development of potentially the first ever PET tracer
for earlier and more accurate diagnosis of Parkinson’s,” Andrea Pfeifer, CEO of
AC Immune, said in a press release. “This important milestone underlines our
vision to become a global leader in precision medicine of neurodegenerative
diseases, leveraging our proprietary technology platform.”
The company used its Morphomer platform, designed to interact with misfolded
and aggregated proteins, to develop the PET tracer, which is highly selective
for alpha-synuclein, enabling an earlier and more accurate Parkinson’s
diagnosis.
AC Immune’s technology is aimed at
not only detecting alpha-synuclein in patients, but also monitoring the effects
of treatments targeting protein clumps. The research
program has been spotting small molecules selective for alpha-synuclein and
suitable for development as PET tracers.
Upon entering the brain, the new
imaging agent, called a PET tracer, binds to abnormal or misfolded
alpha-synuclein. Its radioactive label enables the imaging device to detect
bound alpha-synuclein, informing clinicians on the amount and distribution of
pathological brain alpha-synuclein.
If successful, the new PET tracer
would be the first alpha-synuclein tracer to receive regulatory approval for
commercial distribution. Its specificity would be important not only for
Parkinson’s patients, but also for other disorders characterized by aggregated
alpha-synuclein, collectively called synucleinopathies.
AC Immune has been collaborating with
Biogen on this
program since April 2016. The companies will proceed with the development and
seek clinical validation for the use of the PET tracer as an imaging biomarker
for Parkinson’s.
The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research
(MJFF) is supporting this project. “We are very pleased about
this next important step in the development of an alpha-synuclein imaging
agent,” Jamie Eberling, PhD, director of research programs at MJFF, said.
“Having a PET tracer to detect and
track Parkinson’s disease would be transformative for Parkinson’s research
and patient care,” she said.
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I always say that we may have this illness, but we are all so different.
This is my own daily problems, but I would gladly share anyone elses, if they send them in,