Progress Report
Study Rationale: Alpha-synuclein is central to Parkinson's disease (PD) and accumulates over time in the brain of patients. The ability to measure brain levels of alpha-synuclein would have important consequences for further understanding of the disease and the development of treatments. A new PET tracer, 18F-FD4-a, has the potential to quantify levels of alpha-synuclein and will be investigated in humans subjects.
Hypothesis: We aim to find out if 18F-FD4-a a suitable PET imaging biomarker to measure alpha-synuclein deposition in PD.
Study Design: Alpha-synuclein is the key misfolded protein that accumulates in the brain of patients with PD. The study will image healthy subjects and PD patients with a new imaging biomarker that has the potential to measure the levels of alpha synuclein in the brain using PET imaging. The study will optimize the imaging data acquisition & analysis and assess the effectiveness of the imaging agent for the measurement of alpha-synuclein.
Impact on Diagnosis/Treatment of Parkinson’s disease: The ability to measure brain levels of alpha-synuclein would be transformative for both diagnosis and the development of treatments because it is one of the earliest hallmarks of the disease and accumulates over time. This means that imaging could be used to identify patients early and also to monitor their progression in the presence and absence of novel therapies.
Next Steps for Development: If successful, this would lead to the establishment of a radiochemistry network to enable larger scale studies that would look at further characterizing the imaging tracer in a larger cohort of PD subjects cross-sectionally and longitudinally, laying the groundwork for its effective use in clinical trials of new potential treatments.