The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is supporting a WashU Medicine effort to track neuroinflammation in the brains of patients with Parkinson’s disease. The five-year $3 million grant will allow co-principal investigators Zhude (Will) Tu, PhD, a professor of radiology, and Joel S. Perlmutter, MD, a professor of neurology and of radiology, to use radiotracers to track inflammation in the brains of people with Parkinson’s disease using PET scans.
Parkinson’s disease is the second-most common neurodegenerative disease in the U.S., after Alzheimer’s disease. A hallmark of the condition is neuroinflammation, but there is little understanding of where, or in what pattern, the inflammation spreads in the brain.
Tu, who is also the director of the Precision Radiotheranostics Translation Center at Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, and Perlmutter intend to validate the effectiveness of a specific radiotracer to target inflammatory cells in the brains of model organisms. Through years of collaborative effort to investigate and characterize radiotracers in neuroinflammation of animals, the team identified a promising radiotracer that they have received FDA approval to transfer into clinical investigation for human use. They are now further investigating it in banked patient brain tissue samples, as well as in-clinic Parkinson’s patients, with the long-term goal of identifying new therapeutic targets for the disease.
Read more on the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology website.
