News & Topics
Mar 16, 2016
Report of The 10th HUMAN AMYLOID IMAGING in Miami, FloridaーMaiko Ono(National Institute of Radiological Sciences)
I attended the 10th HUMAN AMYLOID IMAGING meeting held in Miami, Florida from January 13-15, with support from a MEXT Grant-in-Aid Project FY2014-2018 “Brain Protein Aging and Dementia Control”. The HUMAN AMYLOID IMAGING meeting brought together scientists involved in PET imaging of beta amyloid and tau in Alzheimer’s-related disease for discussion of the latest in vivo imaging discoveries.
The “Brain Protein Aging and Dementia Control” project specifies tau as a major research target in dementia. I presented a poster comparing in vitro binding properties of two tau PET ligands, [11C]PBB3 and [18F]AV-1451, for various tau lesions in Alzheimer’s and related neurodegenerative diseases. The topic of tau PET has become a high priority at the HUMAN AMYLOID IMAGING meeting since the discovery of [11C]PBB3 (NIRS), [18F]AV-1451 (Avid) and THK-5105、-5117 (Tohoku university) as in vivo PET ligands for visualizing tau lesions. At this meeting, availability of these ligands to bind and detect tau lesions in non-AD tauopathies via PET and the expansion of human experimental studies using these ligands was the hottest topic of discussion.
Consequently, our results comparing the binding properties of different tau ligands for various tau lesions was of high interest and generated a lot of fruitful discussion. In addition to the opportunity to exchange views with many researchers about our research outcomes, this valuable experience generated new ideas on how to explain our findings and construct a research paper describing our data. Further, the meeting gave me first-hand knowledge of trends in the field of amyloid imaging, and provided an opportunity to think about potential future directions for the development of imaging biomarkers for Brain Protein Aging.
The 10th HUMAN AMYLOID IMAGING meeting was held at a typical Miami beach resort over three days. Due to bad weather I didn’t have the opportunity to view the beautiful beach myself, but a friend who reached Miami half a day prior to me took the attached photograph. On the final evening, my friend and I went to an amusement area, South Beach, for dinner with researchers from Karolinska Institute and to get a feel for the local area and culture. We went to a Mexican restaurant where we talked about the Karolinska Institute while sipping Mojitos, then took a stroll around the neighbourhood to look at the nightlife. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the “Brain Protein Aging and Dementia Control” project for making my participation in this important meeting possible.