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Review
. 2021 Jan 30;14(2):110.
doi: 10.3390/ph14020110.

Tauvid™: The First FDA-Approved PET Tracer for Imaging Tau Pathology in Alzheimer's Disease

Caitlin V M L Jie  1 , Valerie Treyer  2 , Roger Schibli  1 , Linjing Mu  1   2
Affiliations
Review

Tauvid™: The First FDA-Approved PET Tracer for Imaging Tau Pathology in Alzheimer's Disease

Caitlin V M L Jie et al. Pharmaceuticals (Basel). .

Abstract

Tauvid has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2020 for positron emission tomography (PET) imaging of adult patients with cognitive impairments undergoing evaluation for Alzheimer's disease (AD) based on tau pathology. Abnormal aggregation of tau proteins is one of the main pathologies present in AD and is receiving increasing attention as a diagnostic and therapeutic target. In this review, we summarised the production and quality control of Tauvid, its clinical application, pharmacology and pharmacokinetics, as well as its limitation due to off-target binding. Moreover, a brief overview on the second-generation of Tau PET tracers is provided. The approval of Tauvid marks a step forward in the field of AD research and opens up opportunities for second-generation tau tracers to advance tau PET imaging in the clinic.

Keywords: PET; [18F]flortaucipir; alzheimer’s disease; tau neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs); tauvid™.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
(A) The six different tau isoforms of an adult human. Exon 2 (E2), exon 3 (E3), and exon 10 (R2) are indicated in blue, green, and red, respectively. Alternative splicing creates the different isoforms which can be divided into 3-repeat (3R) tau and 4-repeat (4R) tau. (B) Different diseases can involve only 3R tau or 4R tau, or both of them as the main proteopathy [7].
Figure 2
Figure 2
The development of tau neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs): tau proteins self-aggregate to form loosely intertwined paired helical filaments (PHFs) and the tightly wrapped straight filaments (SFs), which then leads to the formation of NFTs.
Figure 3
Figure 3
First-generation tau positron emission tomography (PET) tracers, including Tauvid.
Scheme 1
Scheme 1
Radiosynthesis of Tauvid.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Structures of second-generation Tau PET tracers currently in clinical evaluation.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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