AD/PD 2026 | The clinical utility of second-generation tau PET tracers in neurodegenerative diseases

Well, I think that these second-generation tau tracers are quite important in these senses. As I was telling at the beginning, first of all, because they allow us to infer the isoform of the tau proteins in these brains by means of differential diagnosis, for instance, there are several neurodegenerative diseases sharing clinical aspects between them, and it’s not always easy to clearly say this is A and this is B, and why this is A and why this is not B. These kinds of tracers at an individual level may help us a lot because if you are dealing with the questions of is it an Alzheimer’s disease or a corticobasal degeneration, tau PET tracer can answer many things about these questions. But on the other side, and for me this is the more important thing, it allows us to interrogate several things that are happening in the brain of people experiencing neurodegenerative diseases several years before these diseases are expressed. And you can interrogate the pathology, the neuropathology of the events that are happening there. And also you can use this as a biomarker. Let’s think about the possibility of doing something by means of treatments in primary tauopathies or in secondary tauopathies at the very early stages or even in pre-manifest stages where you cannot see things or symptoms of the disease. This kind of super selective PET tracers can allow us to see if our treatments are doing something into the neuropathological basis of all of these diseases.

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