Pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly has acquired two investigational PET drug candidates from Siemens Healthcare designed to image early signs of Alzheimer's disease.
Both tracers are designed to image tau (or neurofibrillary) tangles in the brain, one of two known signs of Alzheimer's disease. It is believed that the amount and location of tau tangles in the brain correlate with the severity of Alzheimer's disease, but there are currently no approved diagnostics to detect tau tangles in living patients.
Lilly will initially concentrate on incorporating the new tracers into its antiamyloid and antitau R&D programs, with the goal of developing a tau tangle PET tracer that could enable tailoring and early identification of at-risk patients, while also providing a marker for treatment response.
The development effort will be carried out by Lilly's Avid Radiopharmaceuticals unit, the company's subsidiary that focus on molecular imaging. Lilly already markets Amyvid (florbetapir), a PET tracer designed to detect early signs of Alzheimer's disease.
