Imanova has been awarded an additional 1 million pounds (1.17 million euros) of strategic funding from the U.K. Medical Research Council (MRC) for clinical evaluation of PET imaging tracers for mitochondrial dysfunction and synaptic loss in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.
This is stage 1 of the Molecular Imaging of Neurodegenerative Disease -- Mitochondria, Associated Proteins & Synapses (MIND-MAPS) program. The precompetitive consortium among Imanova, AbbVie, the MRC, and the Hamamatsu Photonics PET facility draws on the therapy area expertise of the Dementias Platform UK (DPUK) members. The platform is a newly established network that links neuroimaging for neurodegenerative disease across eight major U.K. research institutions: Cambridge, University College London, Kings College London, Imperial College London, Cardiff, Manchester, Newcastle, and Edinburgh.
The aim of MIND-MAPS is to evaluate multiple markers of neuropathological changes in healthy subjects and patients with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases to investigate common pathways of neurodegeneration. Well-characterized molecular markers of neurodegenerative disease progression promise to accelerate the development of disease modifying treatment by providing objective and sensitive early markers to evaluate novel treatments, the firm said.
