Medical Physics Seminar – Monday, February 5, 2018
Characterization of Positron Emission Tomography Radioligands for In Vivo Tau Imaging
Tobey James Betthauser (student of Dr. Bradley T. Christian)
Research Assistant, Department of Medical Physics, UW-School of Medicine & Public Health, Madison, WI - USA
The microtubule associated protein, tau, is implicated in neurodegenerative diseases and has potential for predicting future cognitive decline prior to symptoms of disease and unraveling the interactions between pathological features in Alzheimer’s disease. Since the development of first-generation tau selective positron emission tomography (PET) radioligands in 2013, the nuclear medicine community has rapidly developed sev-eral biomarkers with potential for monitoring tau in vivo. Detailed characterization of radiopharmaceutical production and in vivo pharmacokinetics and spatial binding patterns of newly developed radiopharmaceuti-cals is needed to allow the use of these tracers for detecting tau in clinically oriented research and therapeutic drug trials. This work describes optimization and automation of radiopharmaceutical production, and in vivo characterization of three tau PET radioligands [18F]THK-5317, [18F]THK-5351, and [18F]MK-6240 for use in hu-mans.