THE characteristic plaques of Alzheimer鈥檚 disease have been made visible in the brains of living mice. The non-invasive technique should work in people too, and could improve diagnosis and make it easier to measure the effects of potential treatments.
Amyloid plaques do not normally show up in MRI scans. There has been some success with PET scans, but the resolution is not good, it is extremely expensive and it exposes people to radiation.
Now Takaomi Saido鈥檚 team at the Riken Brain Science Institute in Wako, Japan, has developed a non-toxic tracer that attaches itself to the plaques in the brain. The tracer is made by combining a fluorine isotope that shows up in MRI scans with a compound that binds to amyloid.
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Tests on mice show that the tracer is non-toxic and that only low doses are needed to reveal plaques in their brains (Nature Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1038/nn1422). Saido鈥檚 team has also confirmed that the tracer binds to amyloid in human brain tissue, though it has not yet been tested on living people.
The question remains, however, whether plaques are a cause or just a symptom of the disease. 鈥淲hat the field is grappling with,鈥� says Scott Small at Columbia University in New York, 鈥渋s what is the smoking gun?鈥�
