Tau Consortium

PET

Positron emission tomography (PET) is a medical imaging technique that uses radioactive substances to produce detailed images of the body. PET scans can be used to detect the early stages of a disease before symptoms appear, to determine the progression of a disease, and to help evaluate the effectiveness of a treatment.

PET scans are a particularly valuable tool for neurodegenerative disorders like the tauopathies since these disorders can cause changes in brain structure, metabolism, and function, which can be detected by PET scans. In addition, PET imaging tools are crucially important to the field of tauopathies since they allow clinicians to both detect the presence, the location, and the quantity of abnormal tau build-up in the brains of patients.

The Tau Consortium invests in many programs across its PET imagining roster to include efforts that aim to discover new imaging tracer compounds to improve the sensitivity and selectivity towards the different isoforms of tau, and evaluating emerging PET tracers for first in human studies to evaluate their utility across the tauopathies.