Study Rationale: 18F-FD4 is a new imaging agent that has the potential to image alpha-synuclein in the living human brain with Positron Emission Tomography (PET). Given alpha-synuclein’s central role in Parkinson’s disease (PD) pathology this would have tremendous importance for furthering disease understanding and enabling development of successful therapies.
Hypothesis: The proposal will analyze initial clinical data from 4 Healthy, 4 PD & 6 Multiple Systems Atrophy (MSA) subjects to determine if there signal increases in regions consistent with the pathology of PD & MSA.
Study Design: Xing Imaging will analyse the PET imaging data from the 14 human scans using their advanced image analysis pipelines that are tailored to the quantification of PD and other neurodegenerative diseases.
Impact on Diagnosis/Treatment of Parkinson’s disease: The ability to image alpha-synuclein deposition in humans subjects would be transformative for the field of PD enhancing our understanding of the disease further and enabling the development of treatments.
Next Steps for Development: If signal increases are observed in PD and MSA, further Cross-sectional and longitudinal data will be acquired to better understand its relationship to clinical measures and assess its sensitivity to detect changes over time as the disease progresses.